


Time

by ElspethRoe



Series: World & Time [1]
Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Ambiguous Relationship, Angst, Canon for a long time, Character Study, Courtly Love, Devotion, F/M, Fix-It, Hurt/Comfort, I just can't with Clara's death, Internal Monologue, Relationship Evolution, Relationship Study, Romantic love, Slow Burn, Twelve is besotted, and then not canon, whouffaldi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-12
Updated: 2018-12-26
Packaged: 2019-09-06 00:20:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 39,364
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16821370
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ElspethRoe/pseuds/ElspethRoe
Summary: Because love--it's not an emotion.  Love is a promise.The Twelfth Doctor, and the first face his face ever saw. (Or, a Hell Bent fix-it, the long way 'round.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hey guys!
> 
> So, my dear friend (you know who you are) is in desperate need of some Whouffaldi trash right now, and I'm all too happy to deliver. This fic is going to be a bit of a slow burner, just because I felt the need to go back and examine every tiny little emotion the Doctor felt all through seasons 8 & 9, but by the time we get to the end, well, let's just say we won't be following script to the letter. This fic will be in four parts, (possibly 5, but probably not) and is already completed, just needs editing, so it should be updated fairly quickly. Just a disclaimer, I have ardently hated River Song from her first ep with Ten to her last ep with Twelve, so just know that she's unlikely to get any sort of love or even a mention in this fic.
> 
> Hmmm...I think that's about it.
> 
> BIG GIANT DISCLAIMER: I do not own Doctor Who. Anything you recognize is the property of BBC and the writers.
> 
> I LOVE comments, so be sure to let me know what you think, and I hope y'all enjoy!

_Prologue_

_—_

_Smile for me._

_Go on, Clara Oswald._

_One last time._

_—_

_How could I smile?_

_—_

_It’s okay._

_Don’t you worry._

_I’ll remember it._

_—_

_I._

_Twelve_

_—_

There is a moment.

A sudden, electric, tingling moment; one that burns through him and leaves absolute nothingness in its wake.

A moment, when every bone, every vein, every thought in his head is instantly, inexplicably gone, vanished forever, and he is nothing but a roaming consciousness, a thing neither alive nor dead, lacking a heartbeat, a body, a feeling or thought. 

He is _nothing._ He simply is.

And then, just as suddenly and twice as painfully, hundreds of bones, an ocean of blood, entire _millennia_ of thoughts that this jolting, only-just-arrived mind has not yet thought—they are all there, when less than a shred of a second ago they were not.

 _He doesn’t expect them to creak._

And out of the burning darkness, a face.

_He can’t remember her name. Can’t say if he’s ever known her name, if he’s ever even seen her before today, before this very moment. If she was here before, or has only just arrived with him now._

In less time than was required for the swapping of one set of bones for the next, in the midst of organs sliding into place and new skin settling over the pumping blood that keeps it alive; though he doesn’t fully realize at the time, every detail, every curve, point, and freckle, is sinking, melting into him, burning him more fiercely than the fire that brought him here did.

 _It twists and folds itself, turns into shapes he cannot follow, until it is just the right size, and slips into a tiny, unnoticed space inside of him._

_A hole, aching and empty, something unique to this regeneration, not the last._

And in a fabulous, gasping, utterly illogical moment, a small fraction of the brightly-lit, disjointed puzzle pops into place.

_“Just one question—Do you happen to know how to fly this thing?”_

_~_

This regeneration in particular—out of all the others—is one of the most brutal. 

He is sore and exhausted, and later, when he remembers _everything,_ he is verging on a little mad. 

A mad man, wearing a second-hand face. 

_Who frowned me this face?_

There is a frightening stretch of time when it seems that his own, familiar face is now being worn on someone else’s body.

That face; the one that feels more like himself than his own. 

She follows him around, all tiny with her accent off-kilter, and everything in her is tense, she feels that there is _danger._

So he is tense too. _He_ is afraid too. 

She is afraid of him, feels estranged from him, does not know a single line of this new, but second-hand face.

And so, _he too._

He takes her judgment as his own without a second thought in those odd, shimmery, terribly off-putting moments, because he knows her face better than he knows his own— _it's burned into him now forever and ever and ever—_ and for a long while, nothing else he knows is any comfort to him at all.

He sleeps, not of his own volition.

He stays that way, because she is by his side. 

When he wakes, he is alone.

And he has never felt so unaccountably afraid in all of what he feels certain has been his very long life.

~

There is a night. 

He walks many streets, and trades a watch for a coat from a tramp.

His regeneration also settles into place at last, and even as he shrugs the coat over his shoulders— _what_ is that smell?—he feels twice as bare as he did without it. 

He woke alone. She _left him_ to wake alone.

He still can’t quite place her,—not fully, all his memories swimming through him like someone else’s stories, a dream he dreamt a long time ago, though he knows well enough that she is Clara—but he knows that he feels just the slightest bit… _awkward_ without her. He isn’t balanced anymore like he should be. That hole inside of him, that place where she fit so perfectly for just the smallest instant before, at the very beginning, is now empty, and the whole of him is swaying precariously because of it.

There is an aimless hour, a passage of time during which he hasn’t the slightest idea of what to do.

He is made achingly, brutally, almost unbearably new. And he is alone for it. 

But with the coming of the morning, the newspaper comes too.

_Impossible Girl._

There are a thousand memories to go with that, a thousand dreamscapes, and he browses slowly through them as he crosses one street after the other, _Impossible Girl, Impossible Girl._

When he walks through the door of the restaurant, he doesn’t bother with the time or thought required to notice a single detail around him.

He knows only a few things:

He is tired, relieved, and uncomfortable as he takes his seat beside her. All three. 

Simultaneously.

He is a little afraid of her. Never used to be; he is certain of that, even if he can’t remember why. But she left him alone a few hours ago, so he fears her now. Fears the nakedness that comes with not being near her.

_The nakedness that comes from her looking at him as though he has done something very, very wrong, though he can't have, because this body's only a few hours old._

The third thing he knows, is that despite this newfound fear of his, he is grateful to have found her, and to be sitting next to her. Because now that he’s here, that tiny hole inside of him is just a little closer to being filled, though the sight of her doesn’t do it anymore. Not when her face is all hard and liney, and her eyes are squinty, and she won’t look him full in his second-hand, already-frowned face.

She’s not smiling, tells _him_ not to smile, so he stops. He hadn’t noticed he was doing it in the first place.

_Smiles feel funny, he realizes, on this stranger’s face._

There is a small moment in time when he is quite cross with her. He thinks. Quite cross with the bits of grey that have sprouted from his scalp, and quite cross with her for noticing. _He was young only a day ago._

 _He was very, very old just minutes before that._

And it’s over just as quickly as it came.

Because she’s here, with him, and for a moment he is only relieved to have her back. 

But his mind, his mind has never stopped working, only shifted and rearranged, pushed the useful things to the back and the dream memories to the very front. But when his analysis of the room completes, he is forced to look away.

Her hair in his hand, between his fingers. Then another. 

Her face scowls at him. He thinks that expression is a somewhat new one. For the old him, she used to smile.

_Clara._

None of that matters much now. It _does,_ but not _here,_ in this restaurant where her hair falls straight to the floor. 

And as they sink to the floor, he feels just slightly strange. A new face. New fingers and toes. Memories that he knows belong to him, but that still don’t feel like his own. _None of this should feel quite so foreign. Something tells him it wasn’t this bad last time._ And Clara Oswald by his side, his impossible girl.

She’s quick.

She’s cross.

She’s frowney.

They are here, but it’s like being miles apart, like being on the phone, talking, but not _together._

Disjointed. Not the same.

She isn’t foreign, but though she seems as familiar to him as anything this face has yet encountered, he doesn’t know her yet. Not like he knows he _should._

He hopes he’ll remember all of her soon. 

~

Five-foot-one and crying.

Neither of them ever stood a chance—not the droid, and certainly not himself. 

But when he pulls off the disguise, before that, when he takes her hand, that tiny, shaking hand, that she holds so tentatively behind her—is she afraid too?—something else, something bigger, more tangible _,_ fundamental clicks solidly into place. 

Clara is afraid, because there are monsters.

He is the Doctor, and he makes them go away.

It's like her tiny hand has passed him a precious, precious gift, and he wants to thank her for it. 

But he doesn’t have the time.

He leaves her safe, or as safe as she can be, with Vastra, and he goes to face the monsters alone.

~ 

It's infuriating, just how many things are so familiar, a word _just_ _there_ on the tip of his tongue, and yet so very far away.

_He’s sure he’s seen something like this before._

But it doesn’t matter. He pours himself a whiskey just in time to float over the rooftops of London.

Buoyed by a balloon of human skin. 

And he thinks, inexplicably, of brooms.

Uses the metaphor with all his might.

Comes up very short indeed.

_Maybe that’s why everything’s so much harder this time around; so foreign and uninviting._

_At least he can still sweep the floor._

And at the very end, a ledge. Because even now, in a new mind that doesn’t know his own name half the time, none of those people down there are ever small to him.

_Down there, five-foot-one can be called a giant if you’ve got the right pair of eyes to see it._

So.

_“You realize, of course, one of us is lying about our basic programming?"_

And he thinks it’s terribly ironic, that the first time anything of this new body feels comfortable, familiar, it is his hands, just now.

Clenched. 

_Ready._

_~_

He knew only a few things before walking into the restaurant.

Now he knows a few more.

First, he is the Doctor. He digs through the TARDIS wardrobe. Moves all his bowties to the very bottom and hauls up something… _minimalistic_ instead.

Second, he is not the same Doctor he once was. The rules have grown complicated this time around; he can _feel_ it in his aching bones. Regeneration is a lottery, and he knows it’s come to this for a reason, though he can’t say just what.

Third, well, _the third…_

He’s sat here, in this TARDIS that shields him, for far too long. Just drifting about, thinking.

_He used to have a lot of round things..._

And he thinks about _her;_ about her crying.

Oh, Clara.

The third thing.

 _“I’m the Doctor. I’ve lived for over two-thousand years, and not all of them were good. I’ve made many mistakes, and it’s about time that I did something about that.”_

And how _does_ she do that with her eyes? 

It’s like they inflate.

She’s only making him want to stall for time, and though he lives inside a TARDIS, time is the one thing he knows he doesn’t have.

_“Clara, I’m not your boyfriend.”_

_“I never thought you were.”_

_“I never said it was your mistake.”_

Maybe now…maybe now she won’t be so cross; maybe she won’t cry? She looks…well, he doesn’t rightly know how she looks; her face is all funny, a puzzle these days in his own memories that belong to no one but this body standing here. But he knows he has a hole that she knows how to fill; a hole that’s searching for her, that _needs_ her. A hole that is afraid to be left alone; made to carry on without her.

He doesn’t know if she has any holes.

But if she does, he knows that he doesn’t know how to fill them half so well as she fills his own. _He doesn't know how to fill them at all._

_And he doesn’t want to make her cry again._

Then, _“What do you think?”_

Coat.

Suit.

TARDIS. 

He hasn’t been laid this bare, this _real,_ in such a long time. So many faces, too many of them young and easy to hide behind.

He doesn’t _feel_ young. Doesn’t remember what it felt like to be those faces, doesn’t rightly know what it feels like to be this one now.

All of him is here now, finally. An entirely blank Doctor, memories firmly inside of him now, like a story he’s just been told, though he hasn’t got a clue who _he_ is, ready to be molded into whatever shape she will have him take

_He remembers her before, remembers her faith, her belief. Remembers her fighting at his side._

_And he wants to make her proud._

But when the TARDIS finally lands, he can’t read her face, her wobbly, confusing face, when she murmurs to herself that she’s finally home.

He doesn’t want her to be.

It’s selfish, horribly so, when he knows more than she ever will about missing home. But he’s so afraid that if she walks out that door she’ll never come back. 

_And that hole inside of him, the one that itches when she’s not there, will never be filled again._

She’s home, but he may never be, and to these new eyes and ears, the TARDIS doesn’t seem right without her.

He’s never been alone; not _this_ him, and he can’t think what to do without her. It’s like she’s a part of his body, and nothing will feel right without her beside him.

 _She says she is sorry._

He doesn’t like her for a moment, because of that. Those huge eyes; he took one, unknowing look at them, utterly helpless and panting from being made new, and now he’ll never be able to go a day without needing to see them again.

 _The first face this face ever saw._

He never had even the smallest chance of _not_ needing her.

But then her phone rings, the little buzzer going off, and it’s like a piece of his brain shifts to make room for one more memory, strange and distorted, but there, all the same.

_Better get that. It might be your boyfriend._

And as he says it, he has the strangest feeling that the words aren’t coming from _him._

It’s…it’s like he’s getting a phonecall at the same time, deep inside his mind. He knows the first word that will be said just before she hears it, and he follows her, watches her, mouths it with the man on the phone with her. 

_It’s me._

And in that moment, that exact second when her eyes go huge, and round, and distant, and she holds her phone to her single heart, he feels more alone than he has since this new face replaced the old.

She trusts the man on the phone more readily than she will ever trust him. 

He feels older than he’s felt since the change; tired and creaky, _grey._

This regeneration is difficult; he doesn’t remember much about what came _before—_ not properly, like it actually happened to _him._

But he remembers a little, he thinks, of what it felt like to be young.

He doesn’t feel young at all now.

And she looks, for a moment, younger than anyone he’s ever seen before.

_“Well?”_

And his hearts hurt, thumping so hard against his chest.

_He can’t do this alone. More terrified than anything she can imagine._

She tells him he shouldn’t have been listening, and it feels like she’s squeezing the life out of him.

_That was me talking._

He wants to shout it; wants to grab her shoulders and shake her. A dozen, a _hundred_ second-hand memories flood him, like he was a bystander at each one. 

If he calls her Impossible Girl, will she see?

If he cradles her and kisses her brow, will she understand? 

_He can’t._

And he wants to scream.

She looks at him like he’s a stranger, and yes, fine, he is different now. His memories have gone all fuzzy, and he won’t be sure for quite some time of just who he is. But he knows _her._

_He doesn’t know himself, not completely. Doesn’t know what he’s doing. But he knows her, and he knows that she should know him._

But she looks at him, and she can’t see him.

 _“I’m not on the phone, I’m right here, standing in front of you!”_

He wants to fling her phone away, because he can’t help that he’s gone all old and grey, that he’s lost all his gentleness and charm. He wants to hold her head between his hands, seep his mind so deeply into hers that she’ll have no choice but to see him.

But he can’t. He doesn’t want to make her cry.

_“Please. Just see me.”_

Because she doesn’t know, _can’t_ know, that he is tied to her forever now. Has her burned on his memory and always will. If she can’t see him, he can’t see himself, and it _hurts_. 

And he is more terrified of just who this new self might be than he will ever admit. 

_“Thank you.”_

She’s come too close. She’s come much too close all of a sudden, and at this distance, her eyes feel like they’re opening up to swallow him.

Five foot one, and she could be crying. But she’s not. And he would be glad, but he isn’t, because she’s gotten very close very suddenly, and he’s uneasy about something else now, something he can’t quite put his finger on.

And then those eyes have disappeared, she has run into him, slung her arms around him, and _oh._

This body, this brand new, second-hand, already frowned, grey haired body, has never known a gentle touch.

_And it burns, every bit as hot as regeneration fire._

There is so _much_ of her, and she floods him through her touch, seeps herself into his mind, and it’s like looking at her for the first time all over again, paralyzing and breathless.

She is burning herself into him, and he’ll never, in all his lives, be able to let the memory of her go. 

He doesn’t want to, even as she leaves him gasping, gulping for a breath.

_It’s never been like this before. So much, all at once. He’s lost his tight-clenched grip on his telepathy, and all of his senses are filling up with Clara all at once._

_Maybe this him isn’t the hugging sort._

But he’ll let her anyway, because she wants to, and she isn’t sure he gets a vote. He’ll let her do whatever she likes, just so long as it means she’ll stay.

_Five foot one, and he’s never known such an incredibly enormous person, absolutely endless with her arms around him._

_Clara Oswald, he realizes, is much, much bigger on the inside._

~

He tries to stay away.

He doesn’t consciously realize it for a while, doesn’t quite mean to, but somewhere between telling her he’ll be back with coffee and walking through the door of the TARDIS, he realizes that he’s let far too much of her in. 

That he’s _carrying_ her with him now, tiny little parts of her, scattered all throughout his memories, his senses. She’s filled the little hole, yes, but she’s created another one too. This one larger and more insistent than the first. 

He is… _unnerved._

So he finds something to do. He’ll fetch her coffee, but he has a _time machine._ There’s nothing wrong with making a little detour along the way. 

He takes his own good time to think. Stares in a mirror for a long while, transfixed by his own eyebrows. 

_They’re absolutely furious._

He walks through a suburban neighborhood in the dead of night, and he talks to a cat hiding up in a tree.

When he returns from that conversation, making his way back to the TARDIS, he thinks rather unexpectedly that in the light from the street lamps, it looks a bit like a snog box.

And that brings him up utterly short, leaving him to walk baffled circles around the TARDIS, examining it and wondering where such a thought came from.

_A snog…box?_

The words in his head echo with Clara’s voice, but it’s too strange, and he doesn’t care to unravel it. Maybe he’ll ask her later.

Maybe he won’t.

He fetches her coffee from Australia, and when he gives it to her and she sees the kangaroos on the cups, he’ll tell her it was absolutely on purpose.

_The Doctor always lies._

Or maybe he won’t. He doesn’t like the idea of lying to Clara. Not if he doesn’t have to.

And then—

Then there is Journey Blue. 

Gun-girl, the girl’s got a gun, and when she points it at him, he snaps at her to _get it right._

Stupid girl. 

It isn’t till he gets to her ship, gets to her people, gets to his _patient,_ that he realizes he’s been rather stupid as well.

 _“No, you don’t understand. You can’t put me in_ there.”

_~_

“Where the hell have you been?”

He’s gotten her fresh coffee by now, the kangaroo stuff’s gone cold. These cups aren’t from Australia, so the lying issue has been made moot.

“You sent me to get coffee.”

 _“Three weeks_ ago.”

Oh.

He’s been deliberately avoiding her, he knows that now, but he’d meant to come right back.

_At least it hasn’t been years._

Five foot one and indignant. _And smiling._ He doesn’t stand a chance if he doesn’t get her inside the TARDIS soon.

Her face is all pink as she follows him in the door. Something about her is unusually _light,_ and he wonders at it. 

If he didn’t know any better, he’d say she was in love. 

_She’s settling into the empty places inside of him, the hole that first filled the moment he saw her, still burning from regeneration, and the hole that she’s made for herself since then; the one that berates him for leaving her._

Clara.

Clara, Clara. 

_Clara._

It’s all a little better now she’s here. A little calmer, a little less horrible.

He knows her. He _trusts_ her.

And he needs to know the truth.

 _And she already knows he’s afraid, despite not knowing this new him at all._

Clara.

_“Am I a good man?”_

And that—just possibly _that’s_ what he’s been wandering around, striking up conversations with cats for. Because he’s not sure, but he thinks she might be. Because she’s already wormed herself inside of him, but if he isn’t a good man, she’s done so at terrible risk to herself. 

Her lips part for a soft, slow moment.

_“I…don’t know.”_

He’s not sure if he's afraid of finding out himself, or of letting her see the truth.

~ 

She tells him she’s got plans.

But he _needs_ her. 

This isn’t like before, isn’t like his murky, foreign memories. It isn’t going to be _fun_ this time. Not just a romp because humans remind him of what it is to be warm and kind.

He doesn’t just want a friend.

He needs her, because there isn’t anyone else. He trusts no one else to help him through this, to guard him, and to guard others from him.

He doesn’t need sweet, lively Clara now. 

Now he needs his companion. _His,_ and not one second-hand from a Doctor who doesn’t seem very familiar anymore.

Maybe she understands that, maybe she doesn’t. But he needs her all the same; has from the very beginning, from that very first look. 

_It frightens him, how much he needs her, and without truly knowing why. It's liking walking forward blind. More than he will ever understand, and more than she will ever know._

~

She slaps him hard, and he is sent reeling.

He has clung to her this time, more than he thinks he has ever clung to anyone before, because he doesn’t think he’s ever been as unsure of himself as he has been today.

 _He may be playing the Doctor, but he’s still so new at this, he can only do it because she is here to be his guide._

Her eyes have widened again, enormous, but these aren’t soft and touched, they’re hard, and fast, and angry.

 _Five foot one and trembling with fury. He’s slowly, so excruciatingly slowly, learning to read her very confusing face._

And she screams at him, in not quite so many words, that he has been unforgivably selfish just now, and that she demands he make amends.

So he takes a breath.

_The daleks are evil. Is that really what we learned today?_

And—

_“Clara Oswald, do I really not pay you?”_

_“You couldn’t afford me.”_

Five foot one, and she’s the most brilliant thing his eyes have ever seen. 

~

He’s so tired.

He feels so old.

_And he is a very good dalek._

Clara. 

_Am I a good man?_

“How do I look?” 

_Oh, he hurts. Aches all over like she’s slapped every inch of him and not just his face. Even her words are grating things for a small moment. What does she want?_

“Sort of short and roundish, but with a good personality, which is the main thing.”

Bright, big-eyed. No, she’s not grating. She’s Clara, and she belongs here. And he’ll feel worse when she’s gone.

And then…then she turns, whispers words about what makes a good man like she is the telepath instead of him. And all he can do is stare.

_He can’t afford to keep her, and yet he can’t possibly manage to let her go._

He wants to tell her she saved him today, saved him on his first day, that he needs her inexplicably beyond what wisdom and good reason should allow, that he can’t even fully remember _why,_ just that he does, but he can’t. The words that are coming to him are Gallifreyan, unspoken for years and years but never forgotten; far too big on the inside for her to understand.

So he tells her she must be an amazing teacher, because on this day, she has forced him to _learn._

She smiles at him as she leaves and he feels the mysterious spaces inside of him, the ones that have emptied themselves for her, ache as she walks away.

~ 

Things calm a bit after that, and he is grateful.

Regeneration is… _taxing._

Learning the way of who he is now is... _exhausting._ And he's never quite sure if he's got it right.

He visits, she visits. They travel a bit. Not much.

He reads. It passes the time.

There’s a day, a Wednesday, when she comes to him and she’s all smiles. And he feels _light._

Five foot one and happy is his favorite—happy and smiling at _him._

It’s so new, and fresh, and nice after the first few days; the long, weary ones when she had hated him for taking the _other_ him away.

They’re still disjointed; odd. She still doesn’t know him, and he still doesn’t know how to be around her.

But they’re trying. And she’s told him she thinks that’s probably the point.

So he tells her to take a punt. Anywhere, anytime.

He doesn’t expect a character from a book, but he’s traveling with an English teacher, so the oversight is most likely his own.

The entire episode in Sherwood Forest is decidedly unsettling.

 _Robin Hood._ The man’s a legend. Except, it seems, he’s not.

There is blushing, and giggling, and at one point he places his bare palm on her skin to feel if she has a temperature, Clara’s acting so strange.

It is, without a doubt, one of the most unpleasant trips he has ever gone on.

But in the end, it all comes down to legends, to _heroes,_ and that’s what unnerves him most of all.

_You are her hero._

Except that he isn’t. He knows he isn’t. He used to be. But not anymore.

Those memories seem so far away, he can hardly remember what it was like.

_Someone else’s second-hand memories of once upon a time being a better man._

He is silent as they fly home.

And in that silence, the solitude that falls after she leaves him for her home, he _listens._

Listens to all the voices in his head, the ones that sound like him, only not him, and the ones that sound like Clara, only from before. Happier. 

_Am I a good man?_

He can’t remember ever being so unsure.

So he listens.

~

_“Doctor?”_

He tells her she’ll just have to squeeze through, and her accent goes extra wide as she asks him what he’s doing in her bedroom.

 _Well, he couldn’t very well park the TARDIS in her foyer for her date to see, now could he?_

But she’s early home, he hasn’t had to wait nearly as long as he’d thought to, and there’s a confusingly strong sense of relief at the end to his vigil.

_“Did it all go wrong, or is this good by your standards?”_

Clara’s never been on a date before. Not since she’s been off having adventures with _him._

Her face is all mopey and long now, she’s curled up into something resembling a ball on her bed, and not even the sight of the TARDIS brings a smile to her face.

 _“It was a disaster, and I’m very upset about it, since you didn’t ask.”_

Right.

He needs her for a thing though, and he’s waited patiently till now for her to get back from her _date._

And trips always make her smile.

But this time, it seems, she’s irritable. And she wants to be _convinced._

Very well.

_“I have a theory. I think everybody, at some point in their lives, has the exact same nightmare.”_

_~_

She’s perfect.

And it surprises him. He startles himself with the thought when she almost reads his mind.

“Have you had that dream?” 

It’s so—

 _Clara. And him._

It’s like knowing something without remembering where you learned it. Something so natural, so _easy,_ and yet—

For the first time since his regeneration, it actually feels like—feels like they’re not just together, but they’re _together._

And it’s perfection.

 _Oh, he’s missed her. Hasn’t even known exactly what he was missing, but knew that he’d know it when he found it, and now he has._

Eager eyes.

Exited voice. 

Quick, ready breaths.

She laughs at him. Scoffs. Asks him how long he's been traveling alone.

_He can hardly remember, it's been so long. He knows that's not really what she's asking, but all he can think is that it isn't relevant anymore, because he isn't alone now._

_He's got her, and right now she's perfect._

She sees the same beauty in the question that he does. Has the same inability to let it go unanswered.

He doesn’t think he’s ever thought of anyone as _perfect_ before. 

_But right now, in this moment, Clara Oswald is._

~

She’s brave. He’ll give her that.

Of course, she’s found her way inside the building when he told her to stay in the TARDIS.

And of course, she’s found her way into trouble while he went looking for it in the other direction. 

He expects all that; sees it from her on a regular basis. 

What he does _not_ expect, is just how fiercely gentle she is with the child she has encountered.

_Although perhaps he should have._

Clara, the boy, _him,_ they all feel the thing on the bed like it’s reached out and touched them; it’s stretching towards them, weaving itself between them.

They’re all connected by their fear of it.

_Fear is a superpower._

And even so, Clara turns her back on it with only one word from him.

And he’s so grateful to her in that moment. So relieved that they’re standing side by side. She’s his anchor, his guide, his light in this body, this mind that is so strange and uncertain to him, but he’s still her Doctor. 

_And she still believes in him enough to follow him anywhere._

He hadn’t been certain till now.

Later, after the thing leaves the room, she digs out a grubby pile of plastic soldiers and tells the boy some fairy-story about an army under his bed.

And then—

 _“See this one? This one’s the boss one.”_

_“It’s broken, that one. It doesn’t have a gun.”_

_“That’s why he’s the boss. A soldier so brave, he doesn’t need a gun. He can keep the whole world safe._

He holds his breath as he looks at her, thinks it again, one more time; can’t seem to find it within himself to inhale. 

_She’s perfect._

Because he knows; knows all of it. Knows that however strange he is to himself know, he is equally strange to her. Knows that she’s hurt, finds him harsh and difficult; unpleasant at times and maybe even untrustworthy at others. 

Knows that she cared too much for the Doctor that has passed.

But she still finds it in her to say things like _that._ Things that make him uneasy; nervous. Things that make him uncomfortable. Things that make him squirm from her, and yet hope that she’ll be back soon.

And in that moment, he knows—there will never, ever be another like her.

There will never be another Clara.

_~_

The rest is a bit topsy-turvy. 

There’s a dinner date, and a Colonel Pink.

And a very stammering, indignant, huge-eyed Clara.

 _“Get them under control!”,_ he snaps at her when they threaten to envelop her entire face.

 _He never handles the eyes very well._

All of which brings them to the very end of the universe.

He doesn’t remember exactly what happens out there.

 _Her wobbly, stretched-too-thin voice, her stung, scared, parting words, they settle in his hands as he holds on, clinging for his life._

Doesn’t remember how he got back inside the TARDIS, or how the TARDIS got them all safely out of danger.

He only knows that he jolts awake, and there is no Clara beside him. 

_Alone, again._

But he doesn’t stay that way for long. 

_“What if there was nothing? What if there was never anything? Nothing under the bed, nothing at the door? What if the big, bad timelord doesn’t want to admit he’s just afraid of the dark?”_

And her _eyes._ He can’t even tell her to control them, because they aren’t letting him move. They’re big, and round, and something else, something fierce, and piercing, and—

_Gentle._

She’s looking at him like she did the little boy, looking at him as though _he_ is in need of protection, and as though—

_As though she’s seen something that has changed him somehow, in her eyes. But he can’t fathom what._

She asks him for something he doesn’t want to give. Asks him to trust her blindly, asks him to allow her to be both carer and caretaker, just this once.

_“I don’t take orders, Clara.”_

_“Do as you’re told.”_

And he does. Because at the very end of all of it, he knows one thing. Before, the darkness and the wind, when he yelled to send her away from the danger he was willingly placing himself in, he made Clara very, very afraid.

And fear can do many things to people. 

It can make them cruel.

It can make them cowardly.

But it doesn’t have to, and if he knows anything about Clara, she isn’t either of those things.

 _He knows her. The very first face this face ever saw._

Clara is strong, and brave, and even when she’s afraid, when it comes right down to it, he trusts her enough to obey her; to take off and never return.

_Her arms wrap around him and he gasps again, tries for a moment to recoil, because it’s still too much, still an overwhelming onslaught of Clara, and she inundates his senses, his mind, until there’s nothing else but her._

_In the end, though, he lets her._

_Because fear can make you kind._

_II._

_Lies_

_—_

As it turns out, the date must not have been a _total_ disaster, because there are more.

Many, many more.

At least, he assumes they’re all dates. She keeps having _plans._

Plans that take time.

Plans that take time she could be spending on the TARDIS.

Plans that take time she could be spending with _him._

And he misses her.

There are small triumphs, though.

The Bank of Karabraxos.

_Beat that for a date._

There’s a savage sort of pleasure in it, and he tries his best not to think too hard on it.

Too complicated. Not interesting enough.

He misses her when she’s gone; that’s all. Time passes more slowly when he’s alone.

So he steals her away as often as he can.

And she is, for a time, happy to be stolen.

_So they run._

They are fast, and they are burning. One end of the universe to the other, from the beginning of time to the end.

And finally, he feels like _the Doctor._

With Clara Oswald close by his side.

Another thing he tries not to think on. 

His need for her hasn’t gone from him as his regeneration has settled. If anything, it’s gotten worse.

He’d thought it was only a reliance during his weakness, that he was clinging to her in his temporary vulnerability, but now he’s only holding on tighter.

And it scares him. 

He’s faced almost every monster in the universe, seen nearly every planet. 

_Demons run when a good man goes to war._

He's still trying to remember if he's a good man this time around or not. Maybe one of these days Clara will figure it out, and if he's very lucky, maybe she'll share.

But Clara Oswald, his unrelenting _need_ for her, the clarity in which she is burned on the fabric of his memory, makes him afraid for reason he can’t quite work out, no matter how he tries.

But then he’ll show her something new, something she’s never seen before, and she’ll _smile,_ and he’ll forget every ounce of his fear, wiped clean by her happiness.

_That, perhaps, should scare him more than all the rest, but when she’s happy there’s nothing in the world that can make him do anything to snuff out her smile._

And then, Coal Hill.

There are tiny people, and _teachers,_ and—

Clara.

And she’s not pleased with him. 

But he goes on anyway, because they’re all in danger, and he’s the Doctor.

_He can’t let her school get blown to pieces._

Because she fills all his holes, all the little places inside of him that keep shifting, that keep demanding time with her. It’s gotten so bad, gotten to the point where he feels _naked_ without her.

He expects her to be cross.

He expects her to be suspicious.

He expects her to try to stick her nose in the one time he’s trying to do nothing but protect her.

But he never expects PE.

_Clara._

He’s upset. And it’s new. 

He’s never been truly _angry_ with her before.

She _lies_ about him.

And no, he has no urge to put the TARDIS on the evening news, but Clara— 

_"Because, I love him!"_

_"Why would you say that?"_

Both of his hearts hurt, because _oh, Clara Oswald, she's gone a fallen in love with a soldier._

And she's so very good at telling her _lies._ At inflating those huge, brown eyes of hers and nearly swallowing him with them.

Hushing him.

Covering the truth of him and his blue box with words like _banging around in space._

_Is she ashamed of him?_

“Because…he’s an alien.” 

And it hurts. 

_He’s an alien._

He doesn’t know exactly _why_ it hurts; she’s told nothing but the truth. But somehow, he expected her to say something else.

_She fills all the holes in him perfectly, but he doesn’t know if she even has any, let alone how to fill them._

She is…so very complicated to him. He alternates between knowing her better than he knows hi own face, and staring at her a like a language he’s never seen, unreadable.

_Complex._

He volunteers the TARDIS for part of her little show-and-tell because he can see just how badly she’s floundering. PE’s going to put her away in a mental ward if they don’t convince him soon.

But he doesn’t care to look at her as he does it. Seeing her downcast eyes hurts.

_And he wonders why._

She takes her soldier boy by the arm when he finally leaves the TARDIS, not a word from him to be heard, and she natters on about miracle explanations that will make all of this ok.

_“And when this is all over, you can finish the job.”_

_“How do you mean?”_

Her eyes aren’t even huge, shocked. They’re just heavy, and he doesn’t know what to make of it; hasn’t the slightest clue.

He’s watched her walk away hundreds of times, but never with the man who has stolen her right out of his TARDIS and into a soldier’s arms.

_“Well, you’ve explained me to him. You haven’t explained him to me.”_

~ 

_Clara._

He’s given her the power to hurt him.

He knows better. 

But he never stood a chance. 

_The first face this face ever saw._

And those eyes.

_It’s like they inflate._

It hurts too much, more than it should, and that frightens him. He has a time machine, can come to her any day she likes, so none of this, her human life and her life among the stars, should ever be a problem.

But it is.

Because she’s done what they always do; she’s relegated him to the periphery of her life, a neat, tidy little corner that will fit his blue box just right, while she goes off and lives the rest of it alone.

_With her soldier boy._

He’s just her Wednesday outing, sure to have her back in time for school.

But what she doesn’t seem to understand, what _he_ can’t understand, is that this face of his, this new face that latched onto her so tight as it breathed its first breath, thinks that she is the center of its universe.

Has made _him_ believe she is.

And he hasn’t a clue what to do about that.

She comes to him all chipper, eager-as-you-please, and it hurts.

_Like nothing at all has happened._

All of her questions, each one stings, because she never questioned him like this before; no, not when he wore another man’s face.

And then— 

_Interesting._

She’s been wanting to see the frost fairs, pestering him for ages, but she seems to have lost the urge to travel now.

 _Very interesting._

She has big, wide, innocent eyes, and it _hurts,_ because she’s lying to him to make her _boyfriend_ happy.

_The first face this face ever saw, and it’s lying to him, blank as a sheet. Snuck PE in here like she’s a delinquent who’s never seen the inside of a TARDIS._

_Didn’t even think to ask him before deciding it would just be easier to lie._

He yells. He doesn’t mean to at first, only means to call her little bluff. But then Dan the Soldier Man, well— 

_When he has fought in a war that destroyed entire planets, that exploded entire star-systems, when he has watched his whole race be slowly razed to nothingness and been able to do nothing to stop it save for send them all to what was almost certainly their doom—_

Then Clara’s soldier boy may call him Sir.

Not before.

_She's gone and fallen in love with a man who hates him for every impossible choice that he's made--every terrible, black day he's ever lived. A soldier boy who hates him because he's the Doctor._

The _boy,_ who thinks he's a soldier but hasn't seen what a real war can be and never, ever will.

_Because of him. Because he won't let it happen ever again. No one will ever have to feel that way but him; he'll take it all and spare them their Earth the way he couldn't spare Gallifrey before sending it far, far away._

When Daniel Pink has been alone for hundreds and hundreds of horrible years, _truly alone,_ the very last of his race, then, perhaps, he will be qualified to tell Clara _who her Doctor is._

But not before.

_Humans. He never learns._

_~_

There is almost a planet-sized catastrophe.

The skovox-blitzer arrives two days too soon.

But then Clara, she’s by his side, and just for a minute it doesn’t matter that she’s hurt and he’s angry.

_They are only running._

And Dan, Dan the Soldier Man.

One brawny jump, and Clara thinks he’s saved the planet.

That’s alright. He supposes the boy did help, at the very end.

They cling to one another, and he scowls at them.

_Clara, what is she doing?_

He _knows_ her, better than his own face.

She is the first familiar, perplexing, stronger-than-iron thing this face ever saw.

This, this Danny-soldier-boy; this isn’t like her. But he’ll let her keep her secrets as she will.

He has a lifetime of his own, and quite frankly, he finds that he doesn’t want to know.

He tells the boy he has to be good enough for her, and it’s a half-truth.

But it makes Clara smile, because she thinks he isn’t hurt, isn’t angry anymore, and she thinks that PE will smile and never mind that she’s half a universe away.

But she should know by now.

_The Doctor always lies._

_~_

He feels it now more than ever, the infinitesimal, wavering disconnect between them.

She has strayed just _this_ far out of his reach.

Her soldier boy has seen to that.

That, and his new-old face.

They bicker more than they used to. More than they ever did before he was _himself._

He doesn’t think she likes him much anymore.

And he…he _misses_ her.

He is _angry_ with her.

He needs her back, because those little holes inside him—they’re _hurting_ because she _isn’t there._

 _Her face was the first his face ever saw._

And then one day they fly to the moon.

~

It’s wretched. 

He knows it’s wretched.

And she thinks he’s doing this because he doesn’t care, but _oh,_ she’s wrong.

_He was saving her Earth millennia before she was even born._

He’s doing this because she’s brave, and strong, and _kind._ Even, if she isn’t always very kind to _him._

But she’s just out of his reach, so he can no longer do everything for her. If she’s going to insist on standing up on her own, she’s going to have to learn to bear some of the weight.

And she does. 

_Beautifully._

But it takes its toll.

_“Tell me what you knew, Doctor, else I’ll smack you so hard, you’ll regenerate.”_

And _there._

He’s lived a long time. He’s seen many things.

But he rarely sees this _._

_Clara Oswald, and look at her go. She’s thinking like him now, and see what he’s done?_

He’s sorry for her. Sorry for what she’s had to do; had to _bear._

But he’s not sorry for what he’s done. She’s been stretching her legs, reaching up high for the clouds, and now she’s learned to stand on her own two feet and be strong for people and things that aren’t him, and he’s so _proud,_ because Clara Oswald is everything he hopes to be, every day _._

And she isn’t hurt.

She isn’t angry. 

Clara Oswald is _done._

_Respected is not how I feel._

She thinks he meant to insult her, thinks he meant to make her feel stupid.

She thinks he thinks she’s _small._

_She thinks he was trying to make her afraid, thinks he meant to hurt her, when in his every waking moment, there is a thought floating somewhere in his mind, about how he might go about keeping her safe._

No, Clara. _No._

_She doesn’t know how big he thinks she is. How much bigger on the inside._

She doesn’t see, and for a moment he’s back on a street in Glasgow, and he’s remembering talking to her on the phone like it’s someone telling him a story. 

_His lonely, bloody TARDIS._

When she walks out that door, it will be.

_“You go away, ok? You go a long way away.”_

And then she’s gone.

_III._

_Withdrawal_

_—_

He goes a long way away. 

And he doesn’t see the sun for nearly six months.

He never opens the TARDIS doors. Just fiddles with the inside. Sits it a chair, and taps his fingers against his knee, and thinks of Clara Oswald, and the tears that fall out of her huge brown eyes when he’s hurt her so badly, that not even the promise of all the stars in the universe can make her stay.

~

And then one day, his phone rings.

~

He watches her take deep breaths as she sits in the café where they meet, and he remembers. 

_I will smile first, and then you’ll know that it’s safe to smile._

So he waits.

She hadn’t looked quite so sad then, that first time. Close to it, but not quite.

Or maybe he just hadn’t noticed. Maybe he notices more now, _feels_ more.

_Maybe he’s felt her arms around him a time too many, and those little pieces of her inside of him won’t ever let him forget how it feels when she does that to him. She doesn’t know just how much of herself she’s sharing with him._

She tells him lots of things that day. That day that hasn’t taken so long to arrive for her as it has for him. Lots of hard things, and they make her face go all funny.

When she gets to the words _I can’t,_ and _Last hurrah,_ her face does something he’s never seen before and goes all…smiling. But sad at the same time.

And all he can do is look, because it’s so _Clara._

She’s the Impossible Girl, and look at her go, doing something so impossibly _human._

And it’s beautiful.

But it makes him hurt.

_Their last hurrah._

He’ll take her somewhere beautiful.

But he’ll never find anyplace as lovely as her sad, sad smile.

~

_“Your train awaits, My Lady.”_

The Doctor and Clara Oswald in the TARDIS, just one last time.

And she’s doing that thing again, the thing where her face goes smiley, but her eyes are big and sad, and it makes him _hurt._

He doesn’t think there will ever come a time when that smile on her face doesn’t.

They stand very close, side by side, almost touching, and she won’t let him talk about planets because she wants to talk about things like hatred with that sad smile on her face, and this will be their _last time_.

So he lets her, even though it hurts.

_“I don’t hate you. I could never hate you. I just can’t—do this anymore. Not the way you do it.”_

And he knows.

 _He knows._

Clara Oswald, in all her splendor, and he’d broken his single most important rule and forgotten, just for a moment, that for all her impossible strength, she is still a magnificently fragile human.

And he is not.

Five foot one, and she's his favorite face in the universe.

_“Can I talk about the planets now?”_

And the train races on.

~

He catches her mid-smile when the conductor tells them about the mummy, and this time, her face is nothing but happy.

She wants it. She can _taste_ it. 

And so can he.

But she can’t do this anymore, and he _hates_ making her cry.

Clara Oswald, and her big, brown eyes.

 _“To our last hurrah.”_

_“Our last, yeah, but it’s not like I’m never going to see you again.”_

_“Isn’t it?”_

_“Is it?”_

_“I thought that’s what you wanted.”_

They stare at each other for a moment, and he can’t decide if they’re perfectly in sync, or entire worlds apart.

 _He still has so much to show her, and he can’t possibly fit it all into one final trip._

_But he can’t make her stay, no matter how he tries._

She’s standing right there in front of him, and he doesn’t even reach out to try.

_He is who he is this time around, and she is who she has always been. She’s brave, and kind, and those eyes, she’s all eyes, and they’re so fierce. What will he become without her?_

This is their last hurrah, the Doctor and Clara Oswald just one last time.

_He’ll never tell her that, as much as he knows she needs this, he’s dying a little with every second he spends next to her, knowing that soon he’ll have to say goodbye._

_~_

He knows he’s giving her good reason to hate him, even as he’s doing it.

Knows that if she stops to think on it, he’s only proving her right.

But he does it anyway, because he’d never forgive himself if he let a girl die just so that he could suffer a little less pain. 

_And if Clara knew, she’d never forgive him either._

He isn’t afraid of the mummy, and though he’s wary of Gus, he isn’t particularly fearful of him either.

But when he looks Clara full in the face and sees the state of her eyes, _then_ he wants to shy away. 

_She thinks he’s done it again; shattered her. And he can’t know yet if he’s about to prove her wrong or right._

She scolds him. Is hurt by him.

He is sorry for it.

But he proves her wrong.

And he’s glad of it.

She’s tired—exhausted, and she seems happy enough asleep, so he whisks her off in the TARDIS once all the others are safely away, and when she wakes, she’s on a dull grey beach with a blanket tucked in around her shoulders, nestled against smooth, white rocks.

 _“Weren’t we…just on a train?”_

A bevy of sleeping beauties ago.

So he tells her. Tells her everything, and watches her _eyes._

They might be the loveliest things he’s seen since—

_Lifetimes ago. Not much in the universe is as hard-soft and on fire as Clara Oswald’s eyes._

But there’s something different now; something new that he hasn’t seen since—

_Something that they’ve never had before._

It’s a stillness, a quiet. An understanding _._ It’s…Clara _seeing_ him. Or trying to.

It’s him knowing her, and for just a minute, her knowing him too.

_“So, you were pretending to be heartless?”_

Clara.

_And hadn’t he convinced her?_

Five foot one and a hopeless fool. The cleverest, bravest person he’s ever met.

_“Would you like to think that about me? Would that make it easier?”_

Because this isn’t the last hurrah she’s fooled herself into believing it is. It’s an ending. It’s a goodbye. 

_And he can't always be the hero she expects him to be._

Sometimes he feels old. Sometimes he gets tired. Sometimes he can't find the right choice, and so he does whatever seems like the lesser evil.

And sometimes everything is just _difficult._

He wants the first face he ever saw to see his own plainly, just one last time.

He gives her the truth. He didn’t know.

He _never_ knows. 

And it’s terrifying. Every moment of every day, and all he can do is run.

And running is so much easier with her by his side.

_“Sometimes the only choices you have are bad ones. But you still have to choose.”_

Clara Oswald peers up at him from out of tired brown eyes, and he thinks she sees him clearly at last.

~

_“Is it like—?”_

_“Like what?”_

_“An addiction?”_

_“Well, you can’t really tell if something’s an addiction till you try to give it up.”_

Now she’s asking him to try to give _her_ up, and he can already feel the first symptoms of withdrawal setting in.

That keen ache deep inside him; the spaces that only Clara fills—empty.

It’ll be hell, and because she’s not just anybody, because she has been his first, he will never, till his very end, not feel the absence of her.

And there’s her phone; the ringing buzzer that means Danny Pink.

He relaxes into her, into the sound of her voice, into her footsteps echoing in the TARDIS. Everything in here seems to have a little piece of her inside of it; a little memory.

_And they’re all so much bigger on the inside._

There’s a contentment to fiddling with the console while she’s near, and he savors it, trying not to think that it’s the last time.

She says _I love you._ She says it breathless; says it _happy._ And just then, he _can’t_ forget. She’s leaving him; this is the last time.

_What will he become without her?_

But she’s going to be happy, and she’s going to be in love.

And he’ll carry on. He always does.

But he’ll never be able to forget, because she's poured herself into him, whether knowingly or not, and he'll carry her around forever, the first face his face ever saw.

He'll never _want_ to forget.

_And then she tells him he doesn’t have to._

She hangs up the phone, and she’s all…

 _Buzzing._

She’s smiling and it isn’t sad, she’s got those big, wide eyes out, and they don’t send pain shooting into him like the weapons she’s proven they can be. They’re bright, and it’s like the first time he’s ever seen them, they’ve been dark and shuttered for so long, her face gone all frowning and sad smiles since the moon. 

But now she’s _happy._ Happy here, happy with him, and she doesn’t want to leave.

_“Are you sure?”_

_“Are you? Have you ever been sure?”_

_“No.”_

_“Then what are you waiting for?”_

And something’s shifted; something’s changed. Something’s _been_ changing ever since he broke her on the moon.

She isn’t standing here now, looking at him and seeing someone else.

She’s standing here with _him._ Seeing him.

And she’s smiling.


	2. Chapter 2

_IV._

_Things_

_—_

There are more things.

They bang about, there are planets, and she smiles at him. He feels his stomach turn all soppy with the relief of it. The relief of her still being there, right beside him.

She's still running, always running, dragging her things in with her, then out. He tells her she could leave them here, _wants_ her to leave them in the TARDIS, because then maybe she'll give him more than just her Wednesdays, but doesn't think much of it when she won't. Clara's nothing if not stubborn.

The TARDIS is made tiny. 

And she saves them all.

He watches her from inside; watches her be strong— _brave._

Watches her be like _him._

And he is so, _so_ proud of her for it, and he is so sorry for everything that’s brought her here. He sees a mirror of himself in her, and it makes his world tilt a little on its head. 

_“Ok, so on balance…”_

_“Balance?”_

_“Yeah. That’s how you think, isn’t it?”_

And oh, Clara. So it’s come to this. He was _born_ knowing her, inside and out. 

But she has grown to know him. 

Too well. 

_“Largely so other people won’t have to.”_

So that _she_ won’t have to. 

Except today, she did.

And a part of him hates her for it. Doesn’t hate _her,_ but hates what she’s become. 

Hates what he’s done to her, in showing her the stars.

It’s so odd, he never thought he’d be here. Never thought he’d be anything but grateful for her.

And he is. So grateful.

But.

Something’s shifted. He _did_ something to her on the moon. Did something to her that he can’t undo.

And for the first time, she’s beginning to frighten him. Her happy, carefree, reckless smiles are beginning to frighten him.

 _“Why can’t you say it? I was the Doctor, and I was good.”_

_“You were an exceptional Doctor, Clara.”_

And she _thanks_ him.

 _“Goodness had nothing_ _to do with it.”_

~

But it doesn’t matter.

She’s still here, and no amount of fear will ever make him regret that.

London is covered in a forest, and Danny Pink steps foot in the TARDIS once more.

PE.

Clara, she’s got all her tiny people with her, all her little humans, one of whom seems to want nothing more than to make her home in his TARDIS, and— 

_And he hasn’t got a clue what’s going on._

She’s looking at him with that light in her eyes, that _expectancy,_ only, for the first time, he’s not sure how to go about following through. 

_What’s he supposed to do with trees?_

But it gets worse. It gets much, much worse.

_All Earth’s futures—about to be erased._

Because he can fight every threat, can defend from every possibility, but he can’t fight Earth itself.

 _Clara._

That horrible expectancy, and his utter failure to follow through.

_If you can’t save them all, save what you can._

“The TARDIS. It’s a lifeboat, isn’t it? Not everybody has to die.”

~ 

_“We are the Coal Hill gifted and talented!”_

PE’s leading the children in a death-chant if he’s ever heard one.

But the TARDIS. It’s here, and she’s right. 

_She forces him to go on, even in defeat. He can’t fight this, has already lost, but she insists he do_ something. _She’s holding him to the mark._

It’s a lifeboat. And it can save the tiniest remnant of humanity. 

Except— 

_She doesn’t want it to._

The kids just want their mums and dads.

_Yes, he knows. And it’s awful._

Danny Pink won’t leave those kids until his dying breath.

Fine. A soldier with some honor. He can respect that, even if it doesn’t help.

But _Clara._

He makes her say it, because he needs her to help him _understand._

 _She doesn’t want to be the last of her kind._

But _he_ wants her to, and so much selfishness rises up inside of him that it chokes the breath right out of him.

He wants to say please. 

He wants to hold her hand and pull it along, lead her in those blue doors and never let go.

Because he can _save_ her. He can’t always save them, he can’t save all of humanity, but he can save Clara _,_ and _on balance,_ it just might be enough.

_The first face his face ever saw._

And so much more.

 _She’s been by his side from the very beginning. From his very first breath._

_She’s fierce and brave; she matches him step for step, and he’s forgotten what it feels like to run without her._

_She’s always kind. She knows that he can’t save the world and care for every being in it at the same time, so she tells him to be a Doctor, and does his caring for him._

He can save her.

It’d be enough.

But she won’t. 

And he feels himself turn sick and burning, _dead_ with it.

_He can save her, but she won’t._

And she sends him away, before turning to whatever home is left for her with Danny Pink.

~

He is Doctor Idiot. 

_“Clara—come back!”_

_~_

At the end of the day, they are together, and this quiet that they share is a salve after fearing for a time that the entire Earth would perish with nothing he could do to stop it.

 _She’s smiling._

She’s warm, and happy, and content too. Has trusted in him, and wasn’t mistaken. 

But he knows it won’t last. She has her Danny Pink now; her soldier boy who tells her just who he imagines her Doctor is.

And sometimes, she listens, and it puts a little twist in the cords between his hearts. 

So he’ll have to fight for her trust, her companionship, each and every day; will have to prove Danny Pink wrong over, and over, and over. Because she won’t remember this forever. Won’t remember him standing with her at the end of the day, watching trees vanish into sparkling light.

But he will.

_Forgetting is the human superpower._

_V._

_Idiot_

_—_

Before the fire, the volcano. Before the keys, and the threats, and the betrayal.

Before she _shatters._

He knows something is very wrong.

Those eyes; they’re not just weapons. She is infuriatingly complicated, can give the TARDIS a run for her money on her best days, and even with two hearts and touch telepathy, even as the last timelord left living, he hasn’t a single idea of how to work the bigger-on-the-insidedness of her out.

But he knows that face. 

It’s the first one he ever saw. 

So he waits, and he _watches._

Keys.

Sleeping patches.

And lava.

Something inside of her has indeed gone very, _very_ wrong.

_“You told me once, what it would take to destroy a TARDIS key. That’s what’s so good about lava.”_

Clara Oswald. He watches her, and he can’t breathe. Dread is sitting on his chest and choking him.

_“Do I have your attention?”_

_“Yes.”_

_“Good.”_

_No, Clara. Not good. What’s been done to you?_

Danny Pink is dead. 

And as she stands there, all his TARDIS keys in hand, as she makes the very worst sort of threat possible to the last timelord of the entire race, he is reminded of what it is to watch a star explode. 

Terrible.

Beautiful.

And then, nothing.

One TARDIS key left in her trembling hand, shaking so much that he’s scared she’ll drop it. 

She’s crying.

_And those eyes._

What she doesn’t know:

Those eyes aren’t just weapons. And they’re not just huge and full of Clara either.

He can _feel_ them. It’s clearer, starker than any telepathy she flings at him when her arms wrap around him. It’s like she’s connected them to him; to his very insides, and sometimes he can’t look into them, just has to get away.

_Because he feels her through them._

And right now, they’re giving him all her pain.

But he still tells her no.

_And she throws away the key._

Clara.

 _“I would say I’m sorry, but I’d do it again._

She’s a tiny, shaking, imploding ball at his feet, and if this body, this mind, _these hearts_ have ever thought they’ve known pain, they’ve been very, _very_ wrong.

_Clara._

This body, this body that is so very attached to her—has been from the beginning—has opened itself up to her. There are so many spaces inside of him that never used to be there, and it’s with an eerie certainty that he thinks to check now, thinks to look, and finds that each and every one of them are all Clara-shaped. 

Spaces for her quick words, the way she doesn’t ask, but tells. Holds him to his mark. 

Spaces for her smiles, her laughter.

For her books and marking that she leaves haphazardly strewn in the TARDIS, making an obstacle course for him when all he wants to do is find his screwdriver.

Spaces, in fact, for her wide, hurt eyes. For her tears. That space is throbbing now, too full, overflowing, growing larger to pull more of her in.

And deep inside of him, where not even he has ever looked, there’s another space opening itself up, clearing things out of the way to make room for another part of her.

_“Do you understand what I have just done?”_

It pulls her into him, just as she is now. Memorizes her shaking, her tears, the sound her breaths make when they’re pulled in and pushed back out too harshly. His keys, flung from her. He’s _angry,_ but the new space his insides have made for her holds her betrayal inside of itself; makes its interior soft and gentler than he ever dreamed anything in this body could be. Holds her close and wraps this bit of her up warm and tight, to never let go.

“Look in your hand. _Yes,_ Clara, look in your hand." 

She’s falling to pieces right in front of him, and there's nothing to be done.

But finally.

Because they’re not sleep patches. 

They induce a dream-state.

_And now he knows._

She looks around her, takes in the TARDIS, still intact, keys strewn all over the floor behind her.

_Her failure. She takes that in too._

She tells him that she loves him, her Danny Pink. Her _soldier boy._

And he scans her, to find that he does, in fact, know that face better than she’ll ever know. She’s a _mess,_ all broken up inside, chemicals making a chaotic soup of horrible emotion that’s wrecking her, leaving her so very tiny. Just now, she looks even smaller than she usually is, a shrunken five foot one and dying on the inside.

As she takes all of it and mulls it over for a passing second, then two, breaths pumping in and out, unnervingly calm now, he knows.

Every ounce of fight in her, has gone and doesn’t have the slightest intention of coming back.

 _He knows what it’s like to lose your very last hope_

And he’s so _angry_ with her. Because Clara Oswald, of all people, should know better.

Should know _him_ better.

Does know him better. Just hadn’t wanted to believe what she knew was the truth.

So he gives her a new truth.

_We’re going to hell._

He can’t stand to watch her, shuffle her tired feet toward the door, doesn’t want to see her like this, all broken and made a wreck of. She should be burning and spitting, _fighting,_ but she’s not. 

And he reaches out to coax her back from the door.

She doesn’t want to come. 

She’s crying. 

She asks him why.

_Why?_

She’s betrayed his trust, betrayed their friendship, mess that it’s been since this face first saw hers, betrayed _everything_ he’s ever stood for.

_She’s let him down._

And he hurts.

He’s never been hurt so much by someone so tiny and little. Never thought it could be possible.

He’s never run after anyone so hard, never tried so many things just to make a single person _happy._

He’s never gotten so lost in a person’s smile.

_He doesn’t want to be here with her; helping. He wishes he could tell her to go and not think twice about it. But he can’t._

She wants to know why?

Because, it’s got nothing to do with her face or his. Has never had _anything_ to do with her precious face that’s going to be stuck inside of him forever.

It’s always been about her heartbeats. She’s human, and she’s only got so many to spend. 

He’s known from that very first moment, the very first second his eyes locked on hers, that she doesn’t _know_ him. Will never know him quite like he knows her. He’d known that she hadn’t particularly liked him either. 

There have been times, he remembers, when she’s even been _afraid_ of him.

Times when he, her friend, has made her feel scared and small. 

_Times her eyes have made him feel ashamed, and times they’ve reminded him not to be._

But she still chooses to spend her heartbeats on him, and after the moon, he knows she doesn’t just travel with him because she loves to see the stars.

It’s because she’s loyal to a fault, and _kind._

Even when he can’t be. 

She’s his carer. She stands next to him five foot one, sparks flying, confusing as all hell, and she reminds him that saving the world is _nothing_ if he can’t care. 

That’s what she is to him.

He hasn’t learned yet how to be the Doctor when she isn’t around, and if he hasn’t by now, he doubts if he ever will.

She wants to know _why?_

_“Do you think I care for you so little, that betraying me would make a difference?”_

The secret pain that this regeneration has brought him from the very first day.

_Does she think he cares for her so little, that her looking but not seeing him would make a difference?_

_That her following, but not trusting, would make a difference?_

_That her lying, leaving, even as she stays, would make any difference at all?_

He’s been her Doctor since his first breath, only hers, and he can’t very well change that now, can he?

And oh, the _eyes._

 _“Stop it, with the eyes. Don’t do that with the eyes! How_ do _you do that, anyway? It’s like they inflate!”_

Those eyes are weapons, and when she turns them on him it’s like she melts him and pierces him all at once. Those eyes make him want to do things for her, make him want to soothe them when they show him her pain.

Those eyes make him feel so _helpless_ when they look at him like that, and here, now, this is the moment he needs to be rock-steady and strong.

This is the moment he needs her to remind him of how to be her Doctor. 

And she does, because here, now, all the broken pieces of her scattered about the TARDIS, she trusts him. Those eyes, he uses them, crouches down and meets them, and she musters up just a little bit of courage for him in return. 

_“Doctor, I don’t deserve and friend like you.”_

_“Clara, I’m terribly sorry, but I’m exactly what you deserve.”_

Her tiny hands in his, and he helps her slide them into the TARDIS. 

_One of those moments. Let’s see what we’re made of, you and I._

And the TARDIS takes them to wherever it is they need to be.

~

It’s difficult for the pair of them.

3W. The horrible tanks filled with the dead.

And… _Missy._

Startling, off-putting, unnerving.

_Unnatural._

And her _heart._

But there’s no time for that, because then Clara’s rushing off to actually _speak_ to the dead, and he’s got to be with her because god knows what she’s going to find.

_He holds her hand, her tiny, chilled, shaking hand, and he tries to keep it warm and steady with his own._

But he doesn’t believe it until he hears PE’s staticky voice on the mic.

And then, Clara, _question everything._

He only leaves her because he has to; because for both of their sakes, he needs to understand.

The moment he sees Missy again, he knows he’s made a terrible mistake.

 _Clara!_

There are long, infinite moments of panic that seem to last forever, first for Clara, then for the people outside St. Paul’s 

_St. Paul’s._

Because he knows. Even though he makes her say it, _he knows._

Danny Pink is dead, and Clara Oswald has broken a bit on the inside because of it, and the Doctor— 

The Doctor is terrified. 

~ 

They kidnap him and strap him into a plane in the sky. 

_Mr. President._

They’re a bunch of idiots, the lot of them.

But that doesn’t stop him from taunting _Missy_ with it.

She kills Osgood because he praises her, compliments her and, for a moment, is a bit taken with her.

_He knows it._

She kills Kate because she knows he loved her father, in his own, strange way. 

And every time she says Clara’s name— _it was her, her, the phone number and the advert, and what is he to do? He can never give Clara up now.—_ it sends fresh fear streaking through him at the thought of what she’ll do to her.

_Not his Clara. Never his Clara._

And Clara herself is…

_Still, and soft, and dying._

She’s with Danny who can’t possibly be Danny anymore, and he knows even as he tells her to run that she’ll never leave him.

So his fall lands him in his TARDIS because he doesn’t have time to die before saving Clara from the deadliness of her own grief, and he’s running for the door before it even fully lands, unwilling to waste a second while he’s in fear for her life.

And there they are, standing beneath the clouds.

 _Clara, don’t!_

But she’s lost to it, to the sight of Danny in the midst of her mourning, and _PE—_

He’s big and strong. He makes a fine cyberman, standing there.

He’ll smash Clara to pieces with one, single blow.

Calls him Sir, and he grits his teeth, because he’s here to save Clara and she’s going to hate him for it.

She’s crying, and he’s never been able to stand her tears. 

_“I had a friend once. We ran together when I was little, and I thought we were the same. But when we grew up, we weren’t.”_

One of those moments. One of those moments when they find out what they’re made of, he and she.

 _“Now she’s trying to tear the world apart and I can’t run fast enough to hold it together.”_

Because pain; pain is a _gift._ Without it he would be just like Missy, uncaring of the hurt and fear it is to be someone who travels with him. Without pain, he would’ve broken Clara just like the moon a hundred times over. Wouldn’t even be here now, because what would her huge, brown, teary eyes be to him but an ugly mess?

_Without pain he wouldn’t need her, because without pain he wouldn’t need someone to help him care._

He tells Danny Pink all about the pain, and soldier boy scoffs. 

_“Are you telling me, seriously, for real, that you can?”_

_“Of course, I can.”_

_“Then shame of you, Doctor.”_

_“Yes. Oh, yes.”_

Shame on him because he can _feel_ Clara’s pain, has felt it since his first breath, and yet still he can’t find a way to let her go.

If Danny Pink thinks he can’t feel every breath of two thousand years’ worth of pain—

Well, Danny Pink isn’t the Doctor, is he? There’s only one Doctor, and he carries the title so that no one else will ever have to. 

Even Danny Pink. 

_And it all goes to hell from there. The rain, the clouds, the inhibitor. He’s horrified. But he needs to know. And Danny Pink says Clara, watch this._

Tells her to watch and see _who her blood-soaked Doctor is,_ like soldier boy knows more about him, has more hatred for him, than he has collected for himself in over two thousand years.

Life.

After life.

_After life._

But Clara. She doesn’t listen.

_And yes, Danny Pink, the Doctor knows what he is. He knows what a war and thousands of years have forced him to become. And if Danny Pink thinks that any bit of his hands is yet clean, then the soldier boy hasn’t fought in a war that was even worth mentioning._

_He knows what he is._

And Clara is brave.

_Do as you are told._

~ 

Clara shatters with all the beauty of a star being born.

And he is put in mind of a dalek who watched the same, and was made new by it.

He tries to pull her back from him, far from the cyberman in front of her that she reaches out to cling to.

_A deadly embrace in the arms of a monster. Not his Clara._

But she’s never in her life done as she was told.

When Missy comes, the horror of it all is only made a thousand times worse. 

_All of this, all the pain and suffering, Clara’s bloodshot eyes, just to give him an army?_

He can’t stomach it. The thought makes him sick. 

_The power to slaughter whole worlds at a time, then make them do a safety briefing._

Missy. _Always._

_“What’s the matter, Mr. President? Don’t you trust yourself?”_

And she can’t know, she can’t possibly know, but somehow, she always does.

_He hasn’t trusted himself since the face before his breathed its last._

And now Clara’s crying in a cyberman’s arms because of him. His failure.

 _Clara._

And there it is.

Good man, bad man, they’re just words in the wind. He is who he is, and he doesn’t need an army because he’s had Clara Oswald beside him from the very beginning.

 _He is an idiot, with a box._

PE.

Clara.

_The Doctor._

Because love is not an emotion.

_It’s a promise._

The clouds have all gone.

_VI._

_His_

_—_

After is a strange thing.

His TARDIS. It’s empty after he brings her home. After he drops her off with a pat on the back and some hot tea to soothe the redness of her eyes.

_Clara, tiny-sweet broken girl. It’ll all heal, given time._

Nothing she has yet done will break her beyond repair.

_Clara, stopping his hearts with a vaporizer in her hand._

_No, not now, girl. Not after everything. All that strength—don’t break now._

_Panic._

_“No! No, don’t you dare—I won’t let you!”_

_Clara, so fierce and hurt. She’s still shattered. She’s just wearing it better now._

_He’s not going to let her live; he swears it. Swears it to Clara Oswald, and it’s a promise he’ll never break. Not to her._

_“Really?”_

_“If that is the only thing that will stop you, yes.”_

_It’s…difficult. It feels wrong. But Clara’s all broken into pieces, and if she does this now—_

_He knows enough about devastating choices and regrets to know better than to let her push the button now._

_And Missy._

_“Say something nice.”_

_And look at them here. He doesn’t have an army, but he does have a button, and this time it’s going to get pushed._

_“You win.”_

_To save her soul. Nevermind what happens to his._

It doesn’t matter that he never got the chance. He would’ve done for her; would’ve done it for Clara.

And he isn’t sure what he should make of that.

But it’s alright. He’s not going to make anything of it at all. Because she’s Clara. She’s his impossible girl made possible and _real,_ and none of it really matters, because betraying him, longing for the old him, a vaporizer in her hand--

He’s not fool enough to think that any of it would make a difference.

He has a weakness for her eyes.

_10-0-11-00:02._

He’s afraid to open the door, though he doesn’t know if he’s afraid that it’s true, or afraid that it’s just another lie.

 _It’s just another lie._

After he’s through, while the TARDIS fumes at him and flatly refuses to fly, he wonders dimly if Danny Pink’s figured it out yet. If Clara Oswald is happy and in love while he floats alone somewhere utterly empty in the night sky.

He doesn’t know how he’s going to look her in the eyes.

~

She’s not lively and cheerful, not sweet, buzzing Clara when he meets her for coffee in a new café.

She’s quiet and subdued, and one look at her wrist tells him why. 

_She’s come here to say goodbye._

So he spares her. It’s so easy once he’s started, just like taking a vaporizer out of her hand. And no, doing the actual _deed_ is never easy, and saying goodbye is dangerously close to impossible, but—

_Better him than her. The least he can do for her is make it a bit easier to say farewell to the stars._

So he does what the Doctor always does, and he lies. Does it right through his teeth, tells her he can make Gallifrey a _better place._

And he’s never heard himself sound so _stupid_ , rarely done anything so painful, in his very long life.

 _He isn't any good and goodbyes._ And she’s his Clara, his second half, this face has never lived a moment truly without her, and he wants to tell her that he’s afraid of being alone. 

Afraid of missing her.

But he lies anyway, because after everything, she deserves only to be happy.

_The old man and the blue box, he'll never fit into her life. Not anymore. Not even into the little corner he's lived in for months, a tiny slice of her time belonging to him._

_One of those moments, that darkest, blackest hour when he finds out what he’s made of, and finally finds the strength to let her go on and be herself. Even if it’s with a soldier and not tucked up inside his blue box with him._

He steeled himself before he came, practiced lines. 

He’s doing just fine until she smiles that strange, sad smile and asks him for a hug.

_He doesn’t think he can manage her touch and everything that comes with it._

But it’s going to be the very last time.

So he opens his arms and she opens hers, and he braces himself for the feel of her—so much of her—seeping into him and burning there, just another little piece of her that he’ll always carry with him, no matter how he might try to forget.

_And he wraps his arms around her in return, because he can’t bear the thought of letting her go._

_“Why don’t you like hugging, Doctor?”_

_Clara._

_There’s a heavy, bitter taste rising in his mouth._

_“Never trust a hug. It’s just a way to hide your face.”_

_The Doctor always lies._

_~_

She thanks him. 

And he hurts.

_For making her feel special._

He thanks her for just the same.

_He doesn't know where to go, who to be, without her. She's all this face knows._

_And he's afraid._

His blue door closes, leaving her standing in the sun.

~

_He sits in his TARDIS for a very long time._

_Alone._

_And it takes every last bit of his strength not to fly back to her and beg for just one last hurrah, for real this time._

_He doesn’t remember falling asleep, but what comes next is too strange not to be a dream._

_What does he want for…Christmas?_

_And a chill goes down his spine, because if he’s already dreaming about Clara, about needing her—_

_He hurries. Because they’ve only got so much time._

_VII._

_Chance_

_—_

The dreams are nothing. 

Frightening, yes, off-putting. Tricky.

But he’s faced much worse before now.

_Clara._

That’s something. Something altogether new and for a minute, horrifying.

_A last hurrah, he supposes, but he was a fool to ever wish for one, because all this means is that he’ll have to summon the courage to say goodbye to her once more._

And then— 

_Danny Pink is dead._

She smacks him hard across the face, and even in that brief period of time, enough grief and rage seeps into him for him to know that Clara Oswald is not doing well.

Her dream is only the final piece to the puzzle.

 _Oh, Clara. Why did she do it? Why does time always do it to them?_ She tells him she lied. Tells him she sent him away to be happy. To go home. And he doesn’t know if he’s ever been this sort of devastated before. 

_He can remember the café like it was yesterday. A hug is just a way to hide your face._

He can’t say exactly how long it’s been for her, but it’s been _months_ too long for him. Months of missing her. Of waking up from unintentional catnaps ready to snap at her for letting him doze off, only to realize she wasn’t there.

Of finding something new on the TARDIS console, a planet she’d love to see, and knowing he would never take her.

Now they’re here, sharing a deadly dream, and he’s racing as fast as his hearts will let him, trying to save her life.

Dream.

And then a dream.

_And then, dream._

Every time, the ice cream pain gets worse. He looks at her, and all he can think is that an alien has a straw pierced clean through her temple, and is sucking the life right out of her through her skull.

So he beats it.

He beats it for her, yes, for _Clara._

The last dream is perhaps not so nightmarish as the ones before, but none of the earlier ones felt like his hearts were being ripped apart, one from the other.

_Clara Oswald. And while he was away, she went and grew old._

It scares him.

It takes his breath from him. 

It leaves him helpless; very nearly unable to move.

Because he thought, for the briefest moment, that he might just have a second chance.

But no.

_He’s the Doctor, and he never gets second chances. Only the one._

_But he never feels the loss quite like he does now. Bitter, and heavy. It makes him want to be less impossible for her. Less alien. Makes him dream, just for a moment, with a Christmas cracker in their hands, of what it would be to be human with Clara._

When he wakes for good and finds a second chance folded into a second chance, his world turns nearly upside down. 

And after the two of them gulp down their stunned relief, he grabs onto that second, nearly-missed chance with both hands.

Because he needs her. She makes him better. She makes him softer.

_She makes him happier._

She doesn’t need to be a Doctor. She makes him into one every time he sees her face.

_The TARDIS is outside._

_All of time, and all of space, is sitting out there in a big blue box._

_“Please. Don’t even argue.”_

At the end, before the beginning, she begged him not to change. Now he remembers those tears of hers from very far away, a dream folded into a dream folded into another, long-past life. 

Now he begs her not to. Begs her to still be the Clara who always wanted to see the stars.

_He’s got so many beautiful ones to show her._

They run away together on Christmas Eve. He steals Clara Oswald because she wants to see the universe. 

He’s always wanted to see it too.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow guys, jeez, sorry for the long wait. Had a bit of an unexpected vacation, (believe me, you don't want to know) and just now got back. So, here it is, and after this I'm pretty sure there's only one chapter to go.
> 
> Enjoy!
> 
> \--Roe

_VIII._

_Mercy_

_—_

Things change.

In fact, from their very first night back together, everything is quite different their second time ‘round. 

_Clara stays._

It isn’t just that she’s back, that she’s off on adventures with him once more, though she is and it’s delicious. 

It’s that she _stays._

There are long stretches of nights when no thought of returning home is mentioned. Over the course of their first few weeks together once again, half of her wardrobe is slowly and unremarkably transferred to the TARDIS for easier access.

She’s settling in.

He’s watching her do it, watching her shoes find a terribly inconvenient place in the console room. Trips over them twice the first day she leaves them there.

When he finds them shoved into a distant corner the next day, he returns them to their home.

_Right where he’ll stumble over them every time he walks by._

She leaves her books everywhere, in the shelves next to all of his, and one time, when they’re fighting for their lives against killer orangutans that he’s never even heard of and he’s frantically searching for a textbook that’ll tell him what these things actually _eat,_ he comes up with the Brontë sisters instead.

She gets an earful that day, and he reads _Jane Eyre._

He does return her, occasionally. But he has a time machine. She can stay with him on the TARDIS for days, weeks at a time, and still make it back before the end of her lunch break.

And he is so unaccountably content when she does. 

She’s changing _him._

_And he promises himself it will be different this time._

Last time he was—

Too much.

From the beginning, he was too much.

In the dalek, he was too much.

At the end of the universe, he was too much.

 _On the moon, he was too much._

He watches her prance around the console room in pajamas that make it look like she’s lost entire inches, and he swears he will be better. Swears he will take better care of her.

Swears he won’t let her get hurt. 

He has distant, terrible memories of watching her die twice. 

He doesn’t need a third time to remember that he never wants to do that again.

~

And then, one day when she’s left him for a bit, gone to her school to wrangle her little humans— 

_Davros._

_He went looking for a bookshop. Her Jane Eyre’s falling apart—she needs a new one._

_He found a battlefield instead._

And he knows he can’t go back because the moment he leaves, the moment he runs from a dying little boy and flies far, far away—

_They start coming for him, and they don’t ever stop._

So no, he won’t be returning to Clara for a long while, for—

_It makes him cold._

He swore this time would be different, and he meant it.

Even to the end.

 _A confession dial._

_A meditation._

_He goes deep into the past and tries his very hardest to forget himself, because sometimes remembering is too hard._

All he wants to do, just for one night, is forget. 

_Surely, he can be allowed just that?_

~ 

If he listens hard, he can still hear the echo of the last chord he played on his guitar echoing around Middle-Age England.

Dudes.

And an axe fight.

And all the rubbish, Scottish jokes he can think of.

Because he’s feeling impertinent tonight.

 _“What’s the matter with him? He’s never like this.”_

And it all comes crashing down. 

Eyes. He doesn’t need to look for anything else. Just eyes.

 _They’re one in a hundred billion; those huge brown things of hers._ And there they are—he’d find them anywhere. They’re bright, and alive, and he isn’t sure when he started thinking of her as _his_ Clara, but it’s been months and months, and now as he looks up at her, all he can think is how brilliant she is.

_His bloody brilliant Clara._

There is alarm. _She’s here. He never wanted her to be._

There’s familiarity. _Of course, she’s here. When is she ever not with him when he needs her?_

There’s something else, too. Something about being here, on the last night, a guitar in his hand centuries before her race will ever see one again. Something a little hellish and rebellious.

She looks shocked; looks at him like she’s never seen him before.

_So he’ll play some more, and then maybe she’ll get an ear for it, Clara-girl._

_And his fingers do the rest. A song so human, Missy will never know. A song so far in the future, it’s a secret code between them that nobody else can speak; just a little whisper in her ear—he sees her, he knows her. This is her and this is him._

_Because it’s only ever them, only ever been them._

And tonight, he plays for them both.

~

_“How did you know I was there? Did you see me?”_

_“When do I not see you?”_

_“What, one face in all of that crowd?”_

_“There was a crowd too?”_

_Her clothes, her books, her shoes in the middle of the floor for him to trip over._

_Clara in the TARDIS while he was still humming with regeneration energy._

_Clara on the Orient Express, locked in a car half the train away, but still never far._

_Clara in the TARDIS, but also at the top of a volcano. Tears swimming in those enormous eyes she has._

_Clara, and her burning, braver than anything smile._

_How can she think he cares for her so little? He_ always _sees her. Can’t ever look away._

_When he keels toward her, lunges at her with his arms stretched out, he catches himself just in time. Gets his telepathy under control._

_Because right now he needs her more than he’s ever needed anyone before, and as he pulls her close, he savors the bits of her that float right through his skin, into him._

_Clara all over his insides, filling all the spaces he’s made for her._

_But he savors the human comforts too._

_She’s warm. And tiny. And soft. Her hair smells like…berries, and warm summer days. Adventures. Her little hands are splayed fingers wide on his shoulders, and in this moment the two marry—the timelord who feels her pressing right into him until she’s all over every thought in his mind, and the man who holds her close and thinks that she is beautifully, wonderfully human._

_It’s his party, and all of him is invited._

_Even the part of him who forgets he’s a timelord sometimes and runs off to be only fiercely human with Clara._

_She’s here with him now, close enough to hold, and what it does to him—_

_He hadn’t quite expected her to take away so much of his fear._

_Nor had he expected her to add on so much more._

_“You know what they say. Hugging is a great way to hide your face.”_

_~_

She calls him out on his lie.

 _“You sent Missy your confession dial.”_

Anything, to save her soul.

He tells her he’s sorry—and he means it too. He was there, that day. There for too much of it, and there for not enough. 

_He never wants to see Clara that broken ever again._

She tells him to make it up to her; she _smiles._

And he can’t smile back.

~ 

He doesn’t realize the danger until it’s much too late.

 _Clara._

He’d never wanted to bring her, never wanted her to follow him, but here she is, and _here_ is—

Skaro.

His hearts do a twin stutter step and his blood runs cold, because Clara and Missy are locked away somewhere, and he’s led them both to _Skaro._

 _He can’t breathe when he sees Clara and Missy with so many guns pointed right at their hearts._

_No._

He watches. It seems to take forever for Missy— _Missy—_ to die. 

She was always so quick. She was always going to rule the whole world.

 _And Clara._

He is sick with it. _Sick,_ because he can feel her as clearly as if her arms were wrapped tightly around him. Feel her pounding fear, feel her breathless stillness, the panic.

The knowing.

 _“Please! Please, I’m begging you, please! Please—save Clara!”_

_His Clara. He is on his knees, the floor cold, and hard, and wretched, and he is begging as he has never begged before, because his entire body is trembling with the force of his cruel heartbeats; the fear that radiates the long distance between him and Clara._

She shouldn’t even be here—she was _never_ meant to be here.

 _She followed him here. He has led his precious Clara to the slaughter. Led her all the way to Skaro, and because she believes in him, she has followed._

_“Oh, Clara. Not my Clara.”_

“See how they play with her? _See how they toy?_ They want her to run.”

_They need her to run._

And he can’t breathe, because she’s Clara.

She _never_ runs. But there’s a hoard of daleks at her front, at her back, surrounding her on every side—

 _And her Doctor isn’t standing beside her._

_Not his Clara, please. He swore this time would be different. He swore that this time, he would save her._

Clara runs.

The daleks scream— _Exterminate!_

_And why has he ever let this monstrous creature before him live?_

~ 

_“Clara Oswald. I want Clara Oswald, safe, alive, and returned to me immediately. You bring her back—you do that. You do that now. Unharmed. Unhurt. Alive.”_

A gun in his hand. And he wishes with all his might that it would stop feeling so _right._

But in the end, it doesn’t really matter.

All he needs is Clara Oswald alive.

_“I saw what happened—I was there! And I’m hoping for all our sakes that it was a trick. Because if Clara Oswald is really dead, then you’d better be very careful how you tell me!”_

Because he’s been left without a hope.

_Therefore, he has nothing left to lose._

He’ll burn everything—every last dalek on Skaro into nothingness—if Clara Oswald is dead.

A gun in his hand, and it feels like Gallifrey; one more time.

_No more._

_“So who’s going to tell me that Clara Oswald is really dead?”_

_~_

_“Clara Oswald is not alive.”_

_~_

And it’s so easy.

 _He wants to burn them all alive._

A little regeneration energy. A moment’s double-edged kindness to a creature who won’t live to taste his own victory. 

It costs him. Will cost him more yet, than he should probably be willing to pay.

_Who knows how many faces he has left?_

But it doesn’t matter. Because with every snake wound tighter around his wrists, with every passing second that he burns his own life into the daleks, he leeches more out of them down the line.

_So he willingly burns._

~ 

_Moron._

_Sewers._

_Bye._

And where is Clara Oswald?

_Unharmed. Unhurt. Alive._

Please.

He’s begged for her today, demanded. Threatened. 

Burned. 

_Clara Oswald, alive. Please._

All he can think about are her things strewn in every which direction in the TARDIS now. Her books, her clothes. 

_Those stupid shoes that he trips over every day, and he could learn to avoid them, but it’s habit by now. The way he says ‘Good morning. I’m glad you’re here.’, without his clumsy words._

She always makes him feel so helpless when she turns widened eyes on him and expects him to find words for her like he does for aliens who don’t matter much on balance with Earth.

_“I am a dalek!”_

Just one dalek, that’s all it will take. Just one dying dalek to tell him _where—_ where she is, because he’s got a good deal more regeneration energy left, and he can make them all burn a lot hotter for a lot longer if she’s dead.

And Missy. 

Clara Oswald is _dead._

The ground shifts violently beneath him, only this time he doesn’t believe for a second that it’s from the daleks. Clara Oswald is _dead._

_How is he ever going to walk into his TARDIS again, when her shoes are right there in the middle of the floor for him to trip over?_

He wants to. Missy curls his fingers around the dalek gun, a gun identical to the one that killed Clara, and _oh,_ he wants to.

_Her bright, fighting, always-too-brave eyes. Those eyes are weapons, because right now the memory of them is making him bleed._

He wants to burn the thing alive, right before his eyes, because Clara Oswald is dead.

_He’s so afraid he’s going to do it. Doesn’t think he can stop himself now._

_Mercy._

~

_He’s…he’s seen many terrible things in two thousand or so years. Done far too many of them with his own hands._

_But he can’t remember ever having witnessed a torture nearly as cruel as this._

_Clara, and for a moment, in a blinding flash of memory, all he can see is a fiery little dalek called Oswin, and Clara Oswald’s big, brilliant eyes._

_Show me the stars._

_He’s sworn this time will be different, but it doesn’t feel that way right now. She’s here, the casing’s opened, Clara whole and alive inside, but there’s fury rising inside of him that he should have to see her like this again._

_“Missy—run.”_

_His hands. He tries to make them tender—tries to remember how, because it feels like it’s been forever, and the last memories of gentle and soothing don’t truly belong to him anymore._

_Clara Oswald, and a Dalek burrowing inside of her brain._

_His hands are shaking so, he isn’t certain he can be trusted to take the little wires out._

_But he tries._

_The friend inside the enemy._

_“Clara, I’m so sorry.”_

_Inside a dalek. He can’t imagine anything more terrifying. More painful._

_The enemy inside the friend._

_Hybrid._

_“Missy, I told you to run!”_

_He knows it hurts, can see it in her eyes, hear it in her shallow breaths, and she makes him feel utterly unworthy when she breathes out ‘Doctor’, like it’s a prayer._

_“Shh, shh, I’m taking them out now.”_

_He finds gentleness that he thinks he should always have with her, but can’t quite manage to. He has it now, keeps working at them, the little cords in her brain, working to pry the evil things out of her skull, because Clara Oswald hasn’t got an ounce of dalek in her and never has._

_Even if he has to slaughter every last one just to make sure._

_He’s got her blood on his hands by the time he’s done; Clara Oswald’s red, human blood, and she’s crying, and he’s holding her up because her legs are weak from fear, or pain, or both._

_Run like hell, Clara. Come on. One of those moments, just you and me, when we find out what it is we’re made of._

_She runs._

_~_

_“Same old, same old, just the Doctor and Clara Oswald in the TARDIS!”_

He says it with a flippancy that’s meant to bolster her while he knows she’s still got blood on her temple, underneath her hair. But he doesn’t feel flippant. He almost lost her. He still has the gun in his hand.

_He almost killed her.  
_

So he travels back in time and saves his Clara the only way he can.

And damns millions of other people to die.

But their deaths—the time continuum—they’ve already been set.

Clara’s hasn’t.

He swallows back the bitter in his mouth as he does it, as he takes a little boy’s hand and shows some _mercy._

This time, at least, he knows his small kindness will be passed along. 

_IX_

_Doctor_

_—_

That night is difficult. 

She cries again, later, after he’s come back for her. She’s so exhausted from being strong, that she just sort of breaks when she finally doesn’t have to be. Upon reflection, he probably shouldn’t have left her there in the first place, brave but weak and all alone on Skaro. 

Even if it had only been for a moment—just long enough to be kind. 

The TARDIS welcomes her, fills a bath for her, presents her with a well-laundered and organized selection of her own clothes.

He makes her a cup of tea. 

She’ll have a scar, he thinks as he sits across from her and watches to make sure that she drinks every last drop. Just on her left temple. That last wire had been damn near impossible to ease out, and so he’d had to resort to a short, sharp tug that had made her cry out in pain.

There’s a tiny, round, bloody scab, that won’t ever entirely fade, and he knows he’ll remember the urge to _kill the dalek_ every time he sees it. 

_Mercy._

She drinks her tea, dozes off for a bit, and he lets the TARDIS whirl them gently through a quiet, starry part of space, unconcerned with anything else in the universe but Clara Oswald. 

When she wakes, he offers to take her home. To bring her back to her little school, her tiny humans. She always smiles at them, and he isn’t sure he’s qualified to make her smile on his own after everything that’s happened to her today.

 _She’s been so very brave. So very Clara. Always. Put on a smile for him and run step for step by his side, just the Doctor and Clara Oswald in the TARDIS._

But she surprises him. 

She shakes her head no.

Her lips twitch in what might be a smile tomorrow, or maybe the next day, and she peers over at the console, at the controls.

 _Show me the stars,_ she says, and he catches his breath, because anywhere in space and time, she’s always there, saving him.

_Just the Doctor and Clara Oswald in the TARDIS._

_~_

She tells him they’re on a roll.

He doesn’t tell her that he’s just glad to see her smile.

He takes her to the frost fairs first—she’s always wanted to go—then to a desert planet that’s battling against an invasion of crab-thingies that are only made stronger by the burning sun.

There’s a planet where they’ve been celebrating New Year for two centuries, and she makes him swear to never, _ever_ reveal to anyone just what she got up to there.

She’d lose her job, she says. 

So he tucks that memory safe inside. He can keep her blushes secret for her for as long as she likes. 

They’re running, _winning,_ and it feels so good because finally this body is starting to feel like _his._

It’s always felt like his, but it’s always felt too bare, too revealing. He’s been hiding behind younger, happier faces ever since he almost pushed a button on Gallifrey, and to be like this once more, old, and verging on stern, and just ever so slightly tired, feels both immeasurably truer, and unbearably vulnerable.

_Maybe that’s why he needs Clara badly enough to not argue when more than a month passes and she never once says anything about wanting to leave._

Clara Oswald, it seems, has lost some of her interest in returning home, while he seems to have fallen into the step of the Doctor once more. They have fallen into step together.

More planets, and somehow, they always run so fast that there never seems to be any time to talk.

And then there is a base. Underwater. In the dark. 

It makes the TARDIS unhappy.

It makes Clara _very_ happy.

The ghosts—he’s never seen anything like them, and Clara is practically _vibrating_ with excitement at the thought of untangling them. 

He has to use the cards. 

He still remembers her in the TARDIS, a pile of notecards nicked from her school in her lap, forcing him to tell her about every near-death experience he’s ever had involving humans.

In the interest of time, he gives her the highlight reel. 

She’d gotten to work then, scribbling in teacher-handwriting the sort of things _she_ is always the one to say.

But she tells him that it always means more coming from him.

He can’t imagine why.

Then she’d made him practice, and with much scoffing, and growling, and rolling of the eyes, mainly from him, he’d made his way through each and every card at least once.

Now four people look at him with blank, shuttered expressions, and he wonders where all their brains have gone.

_“The cards.”_

And Clara, she flips through them, and for a strange, floating moment, he almost feels as though he’s being _mothered._

He is over two thousand years old.

But he reads her card anyway, because that night that she’d made him practice, when he’d finally got the words, and the tone, and the expression right, he’d made her smile.

And he’ll never say no to something that can accomplish that.

Later, in the TARDIS, after the cloister bells have rung, telling him that these ghost aren’t monsters of the usual variety, he can feel her beside him, even though she’s nowhere near, and she’s _thrumming._

Her blood is burning with excitement—he knows it. 

And he remembers her in an arena in England, his arms tugging her close, wanting her own around him.

She’d smiled then too. 

He remembers her locked up inside a dalek, and yes, he can still find the little scar if he tries.

She’s running so fast, he doesn’t know if he can keep up.

_“Look, there’s a whole dimension in here, but there’s only room for one me.”_

One person to stand in front and face the monster head on, and he’s not about to let it be her.

_He doesn’t need to watch her go a third time._

And all the nights in the TARDIS, the cards, and the adventures, and so much bravery, sometimes he doesn’t know what to do with her.

He tells her she should find a hobby, doesn’t want her to go, but knows how much she loves her kids, the ones she chases after at school.

He tells her she should find another _relationship,_ and it hurts to do it, because last time she did, Danny Pink had done his damndest to drive them apart until she hated him; hated her Doctor like the monsters he went to war to protect her from.

He doesn’t want her to. He remembers before, remembers dying and being reborn, a different, far more difficult size and shape, and therefore having to eek out a brand new space in her life.

He remembers having hardly any space in her life at all, relegated to a cramped Wednesday corner while Danny Pink took up all the rest.

He doesn’t want her to take her shoes out of the TARDIS.

But he never, ever wants her to be sad because of him.

Because he has a duty of care, and he’s never going to fail at it again.

In the end, she just keeps running, and he follows her with what might a little too indulgent smile. If she’s going to insist on facing the monsters, she’ll have her Doctor by her side every step of the way. 

~ 

He is forced to leave her behind. 

He hates himself for a moment, as he watches her face on the other side of the wall of water between them. She’s afraid.

_Brave, brave Clara._

He asks her to trust him and he knows he’s asking too much. Remembers the moon, Skaro. 

But she nods. 

_He’s coming back for her. He promises._

_~_

_“Clara, I need to talk to you, just on your own.”_

She’s looking into the eyes of his ghost.

He’s going to die.

And leave her stranded in that base, all alone.

Nevermind, is his first numb, errant thought. UNIT will get her out, she’ll have people, even if they’re not her own. Or maybe UNIT has time travel now, left over from one of his projects? 

She’ll be fine, and he—

 _Will die._

It’s cold. It’s hard, and he never-- 

He never thought it would end like this, in the deep dark, with Clara centuries away, waiting for him to return.

_Do you trust me?_

_“We all have to face death eventually—be it ours, or somebody else’s.”_

But she’s not ready yet.

He tells her there are rules. Too many, and too many he’s already broken.

She tells him to break all the rest.

She tells him, in not so many words, that she’ll never forgive him this if he leaves her all alone, and he knows it’s true. Knows that even if he dies and never regenerates again, he will _never_ forgive himself for breaking his promise.

_His duty of care._

But he _can’t._ He doesn’t feel strong enough; doesn’t feel like he even has the strength to step out of the TARDIS, but he will. Because somewhere, somehow, this is going to end.

_“Clara—"_

_“If you love me in any way, you’ll come back.”_

And he can see her eyes. They’re centuries away, but it’s like they’re right in front of him, and they’re inflating. Going all huge, and round, and wet, and he’s never been able to stand against those eyes when they look at him and demand things he doesn’t know how to give.

Even in a TARDIS, running as fast as he can, he can never escape them.

And he doesn’t want to. 

_Do as you are told._

He made a promise

Fuzzy, afraid, and separated by a wall of water won’t be the last time he looks into Clara Oswald’s eyes.

~

O’Donnell is dead.

Which means Clara is next.

He doesn’t know exactly what he’s going to do; a wispy, elusive plan has been slowly gaining edges, shape in the back of his mind, but he has no idea if it will work.

But he has to try.

_Do you trust me?_

_~_

_His Sonic Specs rest on her face, falling down her tiny nose, and a part of him can hardly believe they’re both still here._

_Paradox._

_When he explains, she’s speechless._

_He neglects to tell her that somewhere deep inside, so is he._

_~_

Somewhere between preventing Mars from being colonized by Cybermen and Da Vinci from being kidnapped by Zygons, he teaches her how to fly the TARDIS.

She knows bits and pieces, has learned quite a lot just by watching, and if nothing else, she can use the telepathic circuit in a pinch, but it’s not that; not that there’s an urgent need for her to learn, it’s—

She lives here now. Lives here with him. Sure, she does return to her little school on occasion to teach class, Shakespeare and hall duty in between planets, but so much of her time now is spent with him.

And he’ll never tell her how much he misses her when she is gone.

It’s silly really, they used to have only Wednesdays, and otherwise she’d be with her tiny humans or PE. Now she’s with him all the time, and yet it seems like he only misses her more. 

So after months of travel with no end in sight, he tells her to drink up on the coffee, because she’s going to have a long night.

She grins like a madwoman standing at the controls, and the first two attempts are utter disasters, the third landing them in the middle of a battle that requires him to use an old pilot’s trick he hasn’t had to remember since the Time War to get them out alive.

They take a short breather after that one, staring at each other in silence and breathing heavily, and in the back of his mind he thinks that not even Clara could come up with an appropriate cue card for a moment like this. 

The fourth time they both take extra care, and before he even lets her touch the console, he moves to stand close behind her, his arms reaching out around her to sooth the buttons she’s been punching frantically for the last two hours.

“Now,” he tells her in a soft, low voice with the utmost patience he can muster because he shouted himself hoarse in the middle of her previous attempt. “she is not a car, nor a motorbike. You are flying a TARDIS. Forget about everything else.”

She nods, and he realizes that he is standing close enough to feel her fluffy hair move against his chest.

He takes his time, guides her hands with his own this time around, because he’d like to not lose any more regeneration energy tonight than he absolutely must.

Whispers math into her ear as they press buttons and turn dials together; coordinates for a planet she won’t be able to recognize by its numbers.

He feels her breathing deep and slow, concentrating, and as he unconsciously matches his breaths to hers he can see in his mind’s eye the hardness of her gaze and the little crinkle that’s surely settled itself into her left eyebrow like it always does when she’s working out a puzzle. 

_He leans forward, rests his hands on the console around her as she types in the coordinates, and when it comes time to take off, they do it together, his hand over hers, gently._

_Because flying a TARDIS isn’t at all like driving a motorbike. It’s like composing a masterpiece._

It's... _strange. Each breath aches a little as he breathes it in. Everything smells so much like Clara when they stand this close. He has to swallow, and force himself to remember where they are going._

When they land outside her favorite café just in time for a morning cuppa, she turns around, his arms still gripping the console around her, listening intently for any signs of an unintentional disaster.

But there are none, and her face has taken on an expression that lands somewhere between pleased and stunned.

He grins down at her.

Clara Oswald was born to be a time traveler.

~

And then, one night he saves a school teacher from having her brains devoured and being asphyxiated in deep space.

“So now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to go outside and wipe my boot on the grass.”

Her eyes look at him like he’s done something wrong, like he’s saved an entire race but somehow come out lacking.

 _He’s not actually the police. That’s just what it says on the box._

She calls him a tidal wave, and god, he hopes she’s wrong. He’s too far into this running thing, he can’t afford to make huge mistakes now. 

However, two sleep-deprived and bickering time travelers do not an unbeatable pair make. 

“Clara?”

“Yeah?” 

“We’re going with the Vikings.” 

~

The Vikings.

The village.

The Mire.

The _girl._

She hits him too hard, stops his breath for a moment and freezes his eyes like she can touch his nervous system, and he _knows._

He doesn’t know who she is, what she is, what she will become, but he knows he will someday learn.

And everything in him screams _danger._

_It’s nothing like magic. It’s remembering—only backwards._

But she’s just a little girl.

A little girl, who is very soon to lose her village and quite possibly her life.

They’re all fools—the whole lot of them. They have their girl back, he has his Clara back—thank god—and they’ve got a whole day before them to run.

 _But they want to stay._

Idiots.

_“Do babies die with honor?”_

Because it doesn’t matter how brave they are, it doesn’t matter how good they are with their swords, they’re all going to _die._

Except, Clara. 

She’s got those eyes, the ones he dreads. They’re round, and full, and _fighting._ They look at him and expect things, things like surviving Skaro, Davros, changing the future to avoid his own death, and he doesn’t know how he’s supposed to follow through.

And a baby, crying. Frightened.

_Fire in the water._

The second he feels her hand, her tiny, warm fingers on his face, he knows what she’s going to say, and it isn’t telepathy, no timelord DNA has ever helped him comprehend Clara Oswald before.

_He knows that hand, that girl, that face. Knows it better than his own._

“You just decided to stay.”

~

She thinks he’s going to win.

Believes in it enough that he knows nothing will convince her to run for safety now, though he can’t help but ask.

 _Because every time they do this, all he can think of is what if something happens to her? What will he do?_

So he’s taught her to fight; taught her to win in the hope that the fierceness he sees inside of her will see her through. 

_Oh, Clara Oswald, what have I made of you?_

_~_

And he does. He _wins._

The war. But he loses the thing that matters.

The human life is horrifyingly fleeting compared to his own; it can be snuffed out as easily as a breath blows out a candle.

 _He is so sick of losing people, so sick of winning the war but losing everything else._

_“Look at you, with your eyes and your never giving up."_

He tells her that one day, the memory will hurt. 

He doesn’t tell her that he doesn’t know what he’ll do when he faces that day, because he can’t fathom even a single moment of his timestream without Clara Oswald in it.

_She says he’s made himself essential to her; bit the words out from a trembling throat across centuries, his ghost staring her hard in the face._

_She can’t know that she isn’t just essential to him—this life, his life, has built itself, built him so entirely around her that she has become the center of his whole world. His universe._

_He has no memories, no true memories that he can rightly call his own, memories that don’t feel like they’ve come from somewhere else far away, of living without her._

_And he doesn’t ever want any._

_Human lives are so horrifyingly fleeting._

He’s angry.

He’s afraid.

He’s grieving, and he knows— _he knows—_ it isn’t for Ashildr.

He’s looking at Clara and seeing her years, seeing her tiny human life span stretched out in front of her like a calendar, a day getting ticked off every time he looks at her, it seems. 

_He’s grieving for her, because while they’re running it can be so easy to forget._

_Easy to forget that he isn’t human, but she is._

And he remembers—a convoluted thing, lifetimes past. A conjecture, a hypothesis.

_Who frowned me this face?_

A miscalculation, perhaps. As soon as the little chip slips into the girl’s head, heals her, he wonders.

He tells her not to thank him yet.

 _Leaves her a second dose. For whoever she wants._

Because he has just robbed her of the ability to die.

Why did he give Ashildr two?

_“Immortality isn’t living forever—that’s not what it feels like. Immortality is everybody else dying. She might meet someone she can’t bear to lose.”_

_Clara’s round, dark eyes. So human. So young._

_“That happens, I believe.”_

~

He never stops watching her.

But it takes him eight hundred years to meet her again.

Ashildr. 

_Me._

And oh, what has she become? What has he made of her with his grief and fear? One miscalculation, a tiny mistake, and he is so afraid that he’s broken his vow and caused something much, much larger than a ripple.

_A tidalwave…_

She’s…not Ashildr anymore. Foreign and cold; strange.

And she thinks he’s come to take her away.

Maybe, maybe he should have known. To be an immortal, to live out an endless life of earth, one single day at a time—

It’s maddening, he knows. 

And there’s an escape to be found among the stars.

But he can’t. He can’t take her away like she wants, because she’s so different now, not human, not capable of _him._

_And there’s Clara._

And oh, what an interest she takes in Clara.

She calls her a weakness.

 _Perhaps she’s right._

She speaks her name with disdain, and he detects a note of jealousy for the girl who flies with him from star to star.

It makes him uneasy. 

_“She’ll die on you, you know. She’ll blow away like smoke.”_

And she says it like it’s a _fault._

_Clara, with her always-brave, never-giving-up eyes. Those eyes that always believe in her Doctor. Even when he doesn’t know what to do. She’s so human, so warm, and soft, and fragile. Burning so bright for him, and he’s always so afraid, just beneath the surface, because some little, imprisoned part of him knows that one day she’ll have to burn out._

_“How many have you lost? How many Claras?”_

He grows cold, and he knows she means for him to. He can’t count everyone he’s ever lost, but he knows with more certainty than anything that there will only ever be one Clara. One Clara had, and one Clara lost, for all of space and time, no matter how many splinters across all of his lives he finds.

_Till he can’t breathe. Till he’s run to the very farthest star, and still, it will be there._

_“I didn’t know that your heart would rust because I kept it beating.”_

And he is reminded of just how desperately he needs her, his Clara. Because she is human, fleeting, _painful,_ but she keeps him from this; keeps him from empty cold.

_He’s been there before._

_She’s saved him from it more times than he can count._

And one time, with a vaporizer in her tiny, trembling hand and an old once-friend-now-enemy on his other side, he saved her. 

_Anything, to save her soul._

He can’t take Ashildr with him. He tells her they’re both immortal, both so far gone from the fleeting, human world that they would never be able to serve it well together.

What he doesn’t tell her is this:

He sometimes has two companions. Sometimes needs two, one to fill in the gap where the other has a fault. But not with Clara. He will _never_ have another companion with Clara, because it would be the end of him. A time would come when saving one would mean endangering the other, and he knows with a resounding deepness that curls itself around his beating hearts that he will always choose Clara, just as he knows that eventually, keeping her safe would cost a second companion their life.

So he can’t be trusted with another duty of care while he has Clara to think of.

Never.

So he tells her goodbye, and they swear to watch out for one another through the long years that will undoubtedly come.

A tiny part of him still whispers _danger_ when Ashildr comes too near.

He soothes it, and returns to the future. Returns to the girl who travels with him from star to shining star.

~

_“I’ve missed you, Clara Oswald.”_

He sees Ashildr, sees her smirking behind Clara in a picture, and it chills him because it feels like the Viking girl is _following_ her.

And he remembers her words about smoke and weaknesses.

But he’s missed her; missed her too much, and now she’s here, and her smile is warm and comforting after all of Ashildr’s cold.

_“Well, don’t worry, daft old man. I’m not going anywhere.”_

She’s _too_ much of a comfort, and after she pulls away, after she grins in anticipation and pulls the lever that takes the TARDIS from the Earth, he can only stare at her, because she is smoke in the wind.

_And he needs her. Savors her comfort. Craves her smiles._

_He knows better._

_Should know by now not to get attached._

_But she’s Clara, and he never stood a chance. He’s been lost to her since the very first day._

Her arms. She loves a hug, his Clara, and he never does it enough; feels like he’s denying her something essential somehow, but can never quite remember to do it.

But he’ll let her fold herself around him as many times as she wants; has grown used to it. 

_Has grown needful for it._

It’s a reminder that he isn’t alone.

_Her days like a calendar, being ticked off one by one._

_~_

Sometimes he tells her stories.

He drags her down to some hidden room inside the TARDIS, finds something to tinker with until it breaks so he can fix it again, and tells her stories of people, planets. 

_Him._

She listens. Laughs at him. Sometimes she tells him stories of her own. 

They laugh at one another, and they do it together. 

Sometimes, if he keeps her up really late, she leaves for a quarter of an hour to search out the kitchen onboard. He’s not sure when she started packing ingredients into its cupboards, but she makes them hot chocolate, and they sip it until night turns to day and he has to take them back a few hours so that they can sleep.

Other times, they never notice when night turns today because they’ve fallen asleep together, in chairs side by side. Once, he wakes up to her head leaning over the arm of her chair onto his, her face all scrunched up and buried against his shoulder, her mouth open. He thinks he can feel a spot of drool.

But he doesn’t mind. He lets her sleep. She's human; she needs it.

He’ll take her on an adventure when she wakes.

~

NIGHTMARE SCENARIO. 

_“Hi, this is Clara Oswald. I’m probably on the tube or in outer space. Leave a message.”_

“Hello, it’s Doctor Disco. I’m in the twenty-first century—don’t know what month. I’m staking out some of the most dangerous creatures imaginable. Operating under deep cover. Trying not to attract suspicion. Give me a call Clara. Nightmare scenario—I’m worried.”

He’s more worried when, one-hundred-twenty-seven phonecalls later, he still hasn’t gotten so much as a message in response. 

~

It takes him too long to notice. 

_And he is so, so stupid._

Just possibly he is so relieved to hear from her— _“Did you just call yourself Doctor Disco?”—_ that he is blinded to what should be obvious.

Truth or Consequences.

_“I used to memorize trivial pursuit questions so I could win…”_

The worst part is, he _knows_ she’s acting odd. Knows somewhere, very deep and hidden away, that the face doesn’t look _quite_ right on her.

But he ignores it, because he needs Clara to be safe. Because this is big; very, _very_ big, and he needs her by his side.

 _If entertaining the idea of changing the past to comfort Clara in the future—‘If you love me, you’ll come back to me.’—was the first danger sign, this is the first sign of that danger growing stronger._

_~_

“I’m sorry, but Clara’s dead.”

She calls him while he’s on the plane, and he’s so glad to hear her alive, and safe.

Gladness that turns to ashes in his mouth.

 _Clara._

_No._

~

 _“I’m still in the hope phase.”_

_“How’s that going?”_

_“Hell. Please talk about something else.”_

He’s floating.

Blown up by a big bazooka, and numb.

She was so strong, so fiery, and the worst part is that she _believed_ in him. Believed in him like he was God, but today he wasn’t. 

_He’s just an idiot with a box._

And he’s never felt more like one than he does now, time frozen around him, just one, long, unending moment of _not my Clara._

_Clara, and instantly he knows that she hasn’t been by his side once today._

And feels all the sicker because deep down, he’d _known._

The hope phase—he calls it that because everything he knows is telling him that Clara is a pile of ragged, foul smelling black fuzz somewhere, and while he might see her face again, it’ll only be to wrench the Zygon out of her form using any means necessary.

_But he can’t help but hope, because she’s Clara and he’s not sure he’s capable of living without her anymore._

_She can’t be dead. Because if she is, he’ll have failed in his duty of care._

_And he won’t even have been there with her to look her in the eyes just one last time._

_He’ll never see her smile at him again._

His phone rings. 

_The Zygon who probably killed her._

“I’m awake.”, it says. And he can’t remember the last time he was so painfully angry, though he fights to keep himself calm.

_A war to win._

He wants to hurt her for it; he wants to so desperately, and it scares him. It’s a rage like he hasn’t felt if _lifetimes._

And then, Osgood.

“Never really met Clara. She was pretty strong, yeah?”

_“She was amazing.”_

Part of him doesn’t want to hope anymore—does want to follow Osgood down that little rabbit hole; the one that has Clara alive on the other side. 

He can’t stand the thought of dreaming of seeing Clara again, only to find her dead in an hour.

He doesn’t know how he’ll carry on. 

_It’s just a theory._

But the hope phase is worse than ever.

~

She’s so strong.

His hearts are pounding as he watches the Zygon wearing her face blink, and blink, and blink.

_Good girl._

Poor Zygon.

“The mind of Clara Oswald—she may never find her way out.”

_Give her hell, Clara. Give her hell from me._

_~_

And there she is. 

Held threateningly between two Zygons, bit disheveled, but _there she is._

He’s never been more relieved, and he’s never been prouder.

_She’s so strong._

But he says nothing, because the war hasn’t been won yet. 

It hasn’t even been started, and he’s damned if he’s going to let it. 

_Because it’s not a game._

And the only way anyone can live in peace, is if they’re prepared to forgive.

_Kate._

_Zygella._

_And the Osgood boxes._

So he turns to her, to the Zygon who wears Clara like a mink coat, and he _teaches._

There are two types of teachers—those who have mastery, and those who have _lived._

When it comes to buttons, and boxes, and the war to end all wars, he is both.

_He is both._

She tries to tell him he doesn’t understand. 

_Oh, that it was true._

_A war bigger than she will ever know. Things worse than she could ever imagine._

_More screams than he will ever be able to count._

He doesn’t have to look behind him to know that Clara _feels_ it.Clara remembers. 

Clara was there.

Clara knows what he did.

 _Clara,_ is the reason he didn’t.

Worse things than _any_ of them will ever know, but Clara Oswald—Clara Oswald can come close, and Clara Oswald, in the midst of all the despair, is the reason he might one day go home.

“It’s empty, isn’t it? Both boxes—there’s nothing in them. Just buttons.”

And he breathes deep, because no one will ever have to feel it—all that pain. 

_Not on his watch._

And there it is; that trembling lip, the wrinkle in the brow. Those eyes, they’ve inflated, and he _knows._

“Gotcha.” 

_Because that face she wears? It’s the first face his face ever saw. And it’s confusing, a constant paradox, a puzzle he can never quite work out._

_He knows it better than his own._

He forgives her, because a long time ago, in a barn that is farther away than the other side of the universe, there was another box with another button.

_Only, Clara Oswald got inside his head._

_She hasn’t left him yet._

_~  
_

She’s all smiles as they walk to the TARDIS.

When he leaves Osgoods to follow her inside, sees her there, fiddling absentmindedly with the console, all he can do is take a deep breath and know that she is _there._

_Alive._

“You must’ve thought I was dead for a while?”

“Yeah.”

“How was that?”

 _“Longest month of my life.”_

He’s going to hug her tonight. He can feel it. He’s… _bad_ at it; at her arms around him, his around her. He's too long and gangly this time around. Too prickly. A body that doesn’t know what touch is and a mind that can’t quite remember.

But just for a moment he thought he’d lost her today, and tonight he’ll hold her close just for a bit, just long enough to feel her single, human heart beating against him, _alive._

Safe.

With him.

“It can only have been five minutes!”, she scoffs, and he has to take a deep breath because otherwise—

He’s not sure. But the feeling that’s welling inside him and rising up, it’s so strong, and it’s chaos, and he doesn’t know what it will do to him.

Doesn’t know what it will do to _her._

So he only says _“I’ll be the judge of time.”,_ and it comes out as a whisper.

 _They fly away in the TARDIS together, and he leaves her at the controls. She can fly them wherever she will, just so long as she takes him with her._

_That night is a hot chocolate night, and they sip it until it’s late, early, then late again, refills upon refills until he’s certain they must be out._

_The cupboards aren’t bigger on the insides, even if everything else is._

_When they do, or at least she does, finally decide to get some sleep, he looks up, remembering the hug he promised himself; the embrace._

_But she’s tired; he can see it in her eyes, hear it in her voice, and she has enough focus only for her bed, so he lets her go._

_Does nothing._

_Just watches her walk away._

_X_

_Brave_

_—_

They can’t stop.

They don’t want to stop.

They pay a visit to Churchill.

Then there’s an invasion of fish-men.

Some time spent with Vastra and Jenny.

And a very, _very_ strange visit to a space station near Neptune. 

They are running, and there’s no stopping them now, because he’s the Doctor and he’s got Clara Oswald by his side.

And then, the second most beautiful garden in all of time and space, and they can never go back because _Clara—_

He’s unnerved, and she’s laughing, her eyes all big and bright, and her smiles are just a tiny bit contagious.

_“Ha! Knew you were impressed!”_

She did, in fact, totally save him from having to marry that giant, sentient plant thingy.

He cracks a small smile.

That bit where she jumped over the side? Just a day’s work for Clara. But she’s right. 

She’s amazing. 

And they laugh.

_Until the phone rings._

~

He goes for the cards.

_Clara’s cards, with her neat little handwriting making curves and lines all over them. Silly, insipid things he’d never say._

_“What’s he doing?”_

_“He’s—making an effort to be nice.”_

But there’s no nice way to tell someone—Local Knowledge—they’re about to die. 

_A tiny new human waiting for him, too._

It’s a chronolock, and there’s nothing at all he can do about that. 

And Clara’s eyes. 

_You’re going to save him,_ they say. _You’re the Doctor, it’s what you do._

She believes in him till world’s end, that one, and sometimes he doesn’t feel like a Doctor at all in the face of her belief.

But she always reminds him that he is.

So trap streets, they search, and they search, and _there it is._

So many aliens packed into little tiny London.

So much _danger._

Every hair on his body is standing on end.

It’s a trap street and they’re trapped, he should’ve known better, and something, _something i_ sn’t quite—

_Ashildr. And her chronolock._

And his unease immediately escalates into _dread._

It shouldn’t, he thinks. He knows Ashildr; knows what she is, knows what she does.

_But that picture. Grinning just behind Clara’s back._

He knows she didn’t contact him like that just by chance.

_She takes careful note of a person’s weaknesses._

_And Clara’s heart is human, while Ashildr’s is not. He’s not forgotten the note of whining, of jealousy in her tone whenever she mentions his Clara’s name. Not forgotten, and not grown any fonder of it over time._

For a moment he wants to leave and never come back, but Clara would never let him if he tried.

So he goes on.

He is a Doctor, after all. 

~

They are angry at each other, Ashildr and Clara, and he doesn’t like it.

Wants to snap at Clara to _be careful,_ because Ashildr’s no more human than he is.

_And is bound by no duty of care._

_“My people were angry, frightened—I had to act!”_

_“This is ridiculous.”_

_Clara, stop._

But he says nothing, because she’s Clara and she won’t thank him for silencing her.

And they’re on the clock.

Later, he’ll wish more than anything, be willing to sell his _soul,_ if only it would give him the chance to go back and take her by the shoulders and force her to look him in the eye and swear to _only keep herself safe._

He’s the Doctor, but there are some things beyond even his ability to heal.

~

The teleport bracelet on his arm, he wants to curse her for it.

_Me. She’s not Ashildr anymore._

He’d felt the danger the first time he saw her.

_His confession dial._

And now this.

But Rigsy will get the chronolock removed, and in all of two thousand years, no one’s been able to kill him yet.

_He can fix this._

And then the universe shatters.

 _Clara, you didn’t!_

He’s white-hot and burning, lit up in flames hotter than regeneration, everything tingling, numb and shocked cold as ice, because _no. Not his Clara._

_Not his Clara._

She turns big, brown, expectant eyes on him, and he wants to run because she’s looking to _her Doctor._

And he doesn’t know how to save her.

 _She has so much faith, sometimes it seems unending. No matter what, she always knows_ _he’ll be there, right by her side. Her never-giving-up. Has the girl ever truly suffered a moment of unbelief in him? And now, of all times, not when the world needs him, or the human race, or some other planet too beautiful to be destroyed, but when_ she _needs him, he can’t follow through._

“We can fix this, can’t we?”

_“No.”_

It tears him in two to rasp just that single word. To take her precious faith in him, faith that he’s dreamt of for lifetimes, and shatter it in his hands.

 _She’s so alive_.

Ashildr did this. And it’s all his fault, because the very first time he saw her, a little, frightened Viking girl, he had known.

 _“I’ll bring UNIT, I’ll bring the Zygons. Give me a minute, I’ll bring the Daleks and the Cybermen. You will save Clara and you will do it now, or I will rain hell on you for the rest of time. You’ve read the stories, you know who I am. And in all that time, did you ever hear anything about anyone who stopped me?”_

_“I know the Doctor, and the Doctor would never—”_

_“The Doctor is no longer here—you are stuck with me!”_

He doesn’t _want_ to be the Doctor now.

Because he _can’t._ Not with so much panic and pain running through him, too much to bear.

 _Not his Clara, not like this. Human lives are so very fleeting, smoke in the wind, and his…is not._

_But he doesn’t know how to carry on without her._

She’s made herself so very essential to him. She looks up at him with those big eyes—“Doctor, for god’s sake, will you stop?”—and she doesn’t know that he can’t do without her.

_She’s the center of his universe. From the moment his face first saw hers._

_And she’s so brave._

“Listen, if this is the last I ever see of you, _please_ —not like this.”

_Clara._

_And for the first time in his life, he has no notion of time—everything is simply frozen, the whole universe folding itself, fitting neatly into her eyes._

_Stars are born, and then they die._

_He’s her friend, making her afraid._

Because he’s breaking apart on the inside, and he _knows,_ all at once, just what he’s become. Just what she’s made of him.

Clara, with her smiles and her enormous eyes. Her kindness. Her never giving up.

Her arms wrapped around him. _Too much._

He should’ve known that first day, should’ve know later too, when saying goodbye had been _so much harder_ that he’d ever imagined.

When he’d gone to hell for her.

When he decided not to die, because she demanded it of him.

_She’s gone and made a human of him; a human who isn’t built to be so big on the inside, so full of her until he’s fit to bursting with it. So many memories and each one’s as big as the universe is wide._

“This—this can’t be happening.”

_This isn’t happening. He feels, for a moment, very young._

 _This can’t be happening._

“Maybe this is what I wanted. Maybe this is it; maybe this is why I kept running. Maybe this is why I kept taking all those stupid risks. Kept pushing it!”

 _“This is my fault.”_

All his fault. 

Clara.

_Clara._

He has a duty of care, and now she’s asking him to break it, but he _can’t._ He wants to be selfish just once, just this one time, because he needs her more than she knows. 

_He’s let her get reckless._

He breaks when she asks him _‘Why can’t I be like you?’_

Because there’s nothing special about him; not a thing besides _her._

_He’s just less breakable than she is, because she's so, impossibly human._

And he should have _known,_ because now every memory, every smile she’s ever turned on him, her huge eyes, they will always _be there._

But she won’t. 

Why is it that the universe always lets him run, but when Clara needs to, it won’t?

_“I should’ve taken care of you.”_

_Better care, because he has a duty to her. A promise that he’s never spoken aloud._

_“I never asked you to.”_

_“You shouldn’t have to ask.”_

Clara, with her bright, burning eyes. She’s so fierce, so brave. She never gives up and she always believes in him.

_Too much._

Clara Oswald is impossible to snuff out. She must be, because he hasn’t managed it yet.

But she’s human; a brilliant, beautiful mayfly.

And he is a mountain.

_He doesn’t want to be._

_But if this is the last time…_

He never wanted this; never wanted to be here with her, breaking.

_Never wanted to be weak in the one moment she needs him to be strong._

She’s strong enough for the pair of him, and he’s shamed by just how brave she is, his Clara. _You’re going to be alone now, and you’re very bad at that._ Shamed by how well she knows his every weakness, and how she wraps herself around them, binding him with words and promises that he knows he’ll never be able to shake off.

_Too soon, they’ll be all he has left of her._

_“You don’t be a warrior. Promise me. Be a Doctor.”_

But what’s the point of being a Doctor if he can’t cure the one who matters most?

_He’s seen so many horrible things, but he never knew the universe could be this cruel._

Cruel enough to let him understand, only after arriving at the very end, just what his terror of losing her looks deep inside of him, curled it is nest, writhing as she orders him not to fight for her.

_He never knew he was capable of so much humanity._

“What about me?”

What about all the spaces that she’ll leave empty, till he’s just a mass of hollow, Clara-shaped holes that will always _ache_ for what will never come back?

_What about his suffering, once she’s gone?_

_There’s that sad smile. He hasn’t seen it for so long, but he remembers it from other goodbyes. Remembers all the hellos that followed soon after._

“If there was something I could do about that, I would. Guess we’re both just going to have to be brave.”

_He can see it now, quite clearly, and it startles him. He can see its reflection in her eyes, and it looks so human. Too human, resting between his two beating hearts._

_Now he can see it, there is no pretending anymore, no hiding, no denying. It’s plain to see that the thing inside of him, all the holes that are Clara-shaped, the ones he hasn’t thought of in ages because she’s always been by his side to fill them, when he pieces them together, the fear, and the hurt, and the forgiveness; the aching, painful need._

_When he fits them all together, they look quite startlingly, painfully like what humans call love._

_A promise._

She’s made a human heart of his two alien ones, and does love— _so much bigger on the inside—_ always hurt this much? 

_At the end?_

And suddenly he is very afraid. More frightened than he ever has been; more than the Daleks, or the Zygons, or the Cybermen can ever dare hope for.

_Because if this is really her end, the last page of her calendar, if her precious heartbeats are truly running out right before his eyes—_

_He can’t let her go without telling her the truth._

_He owes her too much, but the truth is all he can give her now._

_“Clara.”_

Her arms, tight around him, and there is no telepathy, no Clara seeping into him, because she’s already there, nestled into every nook and cranny, filling him. Too much, and not enough, all at once.

In that floating moment in time, he is made entirely human in her arms.

_“Everything you’re about to say—I already know.”_

But how can she, when he’s only just realized now?

_She’s made herself into his whole world. Humans, always so much bigger on the inside. And now she’s leaving him, forcing him to leave her, and—_

_And he presses himself tighter into her arms, even though it hurts, how much of her is pouring into him, lovely Clara that he’ll carry around for the rest of his life, sweet and bitter and an agony, because her arms around him mean that she can’t see all the pain on his face. Everything he would die to own the words to speak right now, written in letters all over his face because there are no cards for this._

_And he doesn’t need them._

She’s asking him not to say it. Asking him to hold that aching, unbearable thing deep inside of him. That thing that needs her.

He thinks now, of how it will turn from confused entrancement, tenderness that comes from her smile and nowhere else, and he thinks how it will make him tremble with pain when her heartbeats have gone.

If he were to choose to be selfish, he would say it anyway, while he still can. All of the things that he now knows will be locked inside of him for eternity. 

_All of those things that will keep him hurting each day she is gone._

Maybe if he gave some to her, he wouldn’t have to carry so much. He could do it now, finally. Knows he can, though he couldn’t before. He loves her. He can say it now, with all her heartbeats tattooed on the back of her neck. And he hates himself for it, because maybe if he didn’t, he would’ve _seen._ But he’d been too besotted with her to notice anything but the burning joy in her eyes.

But he can’t be selfish now, because this is as brave as she knows how to be, beautiful in front of him while his insides tremble like a bloody coward for fear of being without her.

 _And she has always been so very brave._

She looks up at him out of those enormous brown eyes that _know_ him. Those eyes that know everything he wishes he could say.

And she smiles.

_“I know it’s going to hurt you but, please, be a little proud of me?”_

_Oh, his Clara, he’s been proud of her since before he could remember her name._

_Has he really never said?_

_She doesn’t want to hear it now._

He smiles back at her as best he can, because for these tiny, beating moments she has left, for all the stretching span of billions of years he will live, _he cares for her too much, but enough to let her go without trying to make her stay._

_He can’t do that to her, because she’d only have to find the strength to tell him no._

So he doesn’t ask; doesn’t try to hold her close, though everything in him longs to.

 _Two thousand years, twelve lifetimes, and there’s been a Clara in every one._

_But never one quite like her._

Her hands, her fingers, so tiny and strong. Her touch against his cheek feels like…

_When he was a young boy, he had dreams of his mother, of who she might be. Of what her touch might feel like._

_Clara’s touch is as soft and tender as he ever dreamed._

_So he kisses those fingers that are trying to comfort him; trying to comfort him when he should be the one soothing her. Folds them in his hands and presses his lips to the wrinkles at her knuckles. They’re so warm, and blood rushes beneath the skin, so vital and alive. She’s young; there could have been years of life._

_But now she has only heartbeats left._

He follows her when she breathes deep and steps outside, a raven calling in the falling dark.

Watches her stand so still; she’d never run. But he wishes she’d stayed close to him. He would have held her hand through it all. 

_Feels it in his own skin, his own marrow when the shade pierces her._

His hearts sing with pain when he hears her long, pained, frightened scream, and he knows he’ll be hearing it echo in his mind till the end of his days.

_She was always so brave._

After, when she has fallen to the ground and he knows she will move no more, he forces his feet to move, though part of him still insists on waiting because she’s _Clara._ She’ll be up and about soon.

_Walks to her. Kneels at her side. He’s not a fool, to ever think of death as a peaceful sleep, but for a moment he tries to imagine her that way; only sleeping._

_She hasn’t slept anywhere but on the TARDIS for months._

_Strokes her brow, because he can’t know the pain, has never felt anything like it, but he knows that face, knows that voice._

_Knows that his Clara just died an agonizing death, and for an instant, was very, very frightened, all alone where her Doctor couldn’t help her._

_And when the people start to gather, start to come forward to see the human girl who faced the raven on Trap Street, he folds his arms around her and doesn’t let them see. Wraps her up and carries her out of sight, holding her close like he didn’t think he could when she was alive._

_Into the building._

_Through a door._

_Onto a bed._

_Her hand in his, unfeeling now. He kisses it again. Kisses her brow too, and strokes his hand over her hair._

_His Clara, she’s gone pale and cold, and she won’t open her big brown eyes._

_The girl who died because she believed in her Doctor too completely._

_He stays with her long enough to be certain all the pain has gone, though the logical part of him knows it left her the moment the shade did._

_He stays all the same, just to be sure._

_He has a duty of care to keep._

_~_

“I strongly advise you to keep out of my way. You’ll find that it’s a very small universe when I’m angry with you.” 

_Clara, and she isn’t there._

_He doesn’t know how to say goodbye, and perhaps the teleport on his arm is the only reason he ever does._


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alright, here we are--the last chapter! Thanks so much for sticking it out with me you guys, I've really loved writing this.
> 
> Enjoy,
> 
> Roe

_XI_

_Eternity_

_—_

_“If you think because she’s dead, I am weak, then you understand very little. If you were any part of killing her and are not afraid, you understand nothing at all. So, for you own sake, understand this: I’m the Doctor, I’m coming to find you, and I will never, ever stop.”_

_~_

_“Clara said I shouldn’t take revenge. You should know, I don’t always listen.”_

A castle.

A strange place.

And grief, stewing into fury, stewing into something so dangerous, it reminds him of the Time War; of what it was like to be someone else, someone just as old and grey…

_But not quite. Grief comes in all sorts. And this is very, very different._

This time he _wants_ someone to burn. _Needs it,_ because if they don’t, Clara will have been the only one to die today, and all she did was try to do good and save someone’s life.

All she did was attempt to follow her Doctor, to make him proud.

And she died.

His adventures, his TARDIS, _he_ got her killed.

_“I’ve just watched my best friend die in agony—my day can’t get any worse. Let’s see what we can do about yours!”_

_~_

_“You see, Clara?”_

_But she isn’t there._

_~_

When he was a very little boy, an old woman died, and they covered her in veils.

But it was a hot, sunny day, and the flies came to get her.

He had nightmares about it for years.

_Who’s been stealing his nightmares?_

He jumps.

~

He imagines he’s back in the TARDIS.

Showing off.

Telling her how he escaped.

 _Making her laugh._

He can envision every last detail, right down to tripping over her shoes.

But he doesn’t even try to make out her face.

He knows that, whatever he might come up with, no memory will ever compare to seeing her huge brown eyes smiling at him.

_Alive._

_~_

He doesn’t really want to wake up.

He’s warm, and it’s dark, and he’s floating.

 _It would be so easy to just sleep. And he’s so very tired._

He can’t know everything—sometimes he’s bound to fail.

Clara would tell him to fight, to _win._

_But he can’t always._

She’s persistent though, nagging, tugging at the back his mind.

_How’re you going to win?_

He forces himself to wake, to tell her.

But when he opens his eyes, she isn’t there.

~

_It’s all about fear._

It sinks into him, warm. Whoever got her killed is trying everything the universe knows to scare him.

It makes him smile. 

_Because they killed her._

It doesn’t matter if he’s afraid to die, afraid to be alone.

Afraid for his very, very long life.

_They killed her._

His worst fears have already been realized— _Clara Oswald is dead._

There’s nothing in the universe more frightening than that, and he’s already lived it.

_Except going to sleep knowing she’s not there. Waking up and knowing he won’t see her smiling at him._

_The worst part always comes in the days that follow after._

~ 

His TARDIS spills out of his mind, too big on the inside, for once, to stay inside.

_And Clara. She spills out too, though he can’t see her. She’s the voice in his head, the ear that he whispers to. He feels her fingers folding into his every time he hears the flies._

She lives in his shadow, just out of his reach, and he realizes, quite painfully, that he can’t mourn her.

Mourning her would mean saying goodbye.

_He doesn’t know how._

_~_

_Confession._

_Cleansing._

_Release._

_Atonement._

He’s being interrogated. 

And he knows how to make the wraith go away.

The problem is, he holds too many truths that he can never, ever tell.

_Has held them for a long, long time._

But he’s scared, and he’s alone. Scared _because_ he’s alone.

Very, very scared, because this is one of those moments, the darkest day, the blackest hour, when he finds out what he’s made of. And he never quite knows.

She’s always the one to show him. He always discovers just what he is when he becomes it for her.

_But he’s afraid to know what he is when he’s left all alone._

_~_

_He was scared._

_He ran because he was scared._

_Lifetimes later, Clara Oswald made all his fear go away._

_~_

_It’s funny—the day you lose someone isn’t the worst._

_At least you’ve got something to do._

_It’s all the days they stay dead._

_~_

A maximum of eighty-two minutes, from one end of the castle to the other.

Eighty-two minutes to rest, to close his eyes. 

To sit beside her; her dry, cracked portrait, ancient.

Beautiful _._

_It’s all a torture chamber, designed just for him._

_~_

Or maybe he’s in hell.

That’s ok.

He’s not scared of hell—it’s just heaven for bad people.

_But how long will he have to be here?_

_~_

_Who’s been playing about with the stars?_

_~_

The hybrid confession. 

He toys with it.

Weighs it.

Considers it.

Keeps it.

~

Room twelve. 

_It’s a trap, Clara._

_A cruel, cruel trap, a game everybody else has lost._

_~_

When he finally does it, makes the wall move, like he’s secretly, somewhere in the very depths of him, known he could do all along, it feels like his whole body is readying for a blow.

_Four hundred times harder than diamond._

_Twenty feet thick._

_Home._

And then—

And his world is alight with colors, and memories, and _her._

And time stands still.

_Bird._

_~_

_The first time, there are no skulls._

_No grave to un-dig._

_No painting to pierce and comfort._

_He watches the first decade pass with unbearable slowness, frozen, unable to move except from one extreme of the castle to the other._

_Unable to fight._

_Unable to save._

_The only thing left to him is to mourn._

_Years pass before he ever stumbles upon a room twelve._

_More still, till he thinks there might be something inside._

_When he finally understands, at least partly, it’s already too late. He knows he’s going to die._

_So he makes it count, and he hopes the next life will pass better than this one did._

_~_

_The second time is much like the first—he never sees the single skull._

_There is still no grave to un-dig._

_No painting, so still, he mourns. Mourns all over again, as though he never did for all those years that are like wisps of intangible smoke._

_He mourns her poorly, he thinks._

_He loved her poorly, he knows._

_He didn’t care for her safety at all, though he tried and tried. In the end, he couldn’t save her from being killed._

_As the twelfth year passes, as room twelve begins to dance before his eyes, appearing before him time and time again when before it did not, he realizes that if time goes on like this, he will eventually forget the exact shape of her eyes; how terribly round they were._

_He thinks he should paint a portrait. He knows it will hurt like hell._

_He never gets the chance._

_~_

_The third time is the longest yet—over fifteen years, and he never finds room twelve until the very last day._

_But some time at the close of the first decade, he finds himself a canvas and he paints._

_He thinks that, if time goes on like it does, he will eventually forget the exact shape of her eyes; how terribly round they were._

_He thinks he should paint a portrait. He knows it will hurt like hell._

_He does it anyway—while he has the chance._

_~_

_The tenth time, when he finally remembers, he panics, because he’s a timelord._

_He can feel how long it’s been, can feel every body that’s burnt._

_He runs, doesn’t punch the wall._

_He writes a message instead, buries a slab._

_The eleventh time, he thinks to leave a shovel._

_Idiot Doctor who can’t even think to dig up what’s been left behind for him to find._

_The twelfth time, he has just enough life left in him to trace out a message in the sand._

_The twelfth time, he finally remembers the story, and realizes just what game he is being made to play._

_They’re counting on him losing._

_But the Clara who whispers in his mind wants him to win._

_He hopes the thirteenth will be stronger._

_Bird._

_~_

_At the end of the thirtieth life, he begins to despair._

_She asks him how he’s going to win._

_He tells her._

_Bird._

_~_

_The seventieth proves to be the shortest one yet._

_He finds room twelve within the year._

_There, Clara. You see? I’ve still got it._

_Bird._

_~_

_Life two-hundred is a painful one._

_The portrait on the wall is just beginning to crack, to flake, and it’s like she’s dying all over again the first time he sees it._

_He repairs the canvas, touches up the paint._

_It’s no use though._

_There isn’t a brown in the whole universe that is up to the task of matching her huge, round eyes._

_Bird._

_~_

_Bird._

_~_

_Bird._

_~_

_Bird._

_~_

_Bird._

_~_

_Bird._

_~_

_It isn’t until his thousandth life that he can see just the shadow of a smoothed over spot where previous fists have shattered._

_Bird._

_~_

_Bird._

_~_

_Bird._

_~_

_Bird._

_~_

_“That’s_ when I remember!” 

_Every. Single. Time._

Why?

_Can’t he just lose? Please, Clara, can’t he just lose? It would be so easy, and even if he wins, where’s the victory if she’s not there to share it?_

_It would be so easy to tell._

_Because he can’t always win._

He can hear the flies, somewhere outside his TARDIS.

_I can’t keep doing this!_

_I can’t—I can’t always do this! It’s not fair! Clara, it’s just not fair!_

_Why can’t I just lose?_

_No!_

But she doesn’t _understand._

She _can’t_ understand.

She can’t feel the years like a timelord can, can’t feel the burning, isn’t left all alone.

_But I can remember, Clara. You don’t understand. I can remember it all._

_All those years, all those lives._

_All those deaths._

_Her beautiful brown eyes, so brave._

_Be a little proud of me?_

_Every time._

_And she’ll still be gone._

_Whatever he does—_

_Her beautiful brown eyes; they used to make him sink into her. Used to push him from fury, to gentleness, then back again without him ever knowing. Two thousand years, and he never thought he’d find someone with that kind of power._

_His Clara._

_So brave._

_He’s mourned her for seven thousand years._

_And whatever he does, she still won’t be there._

_~_

_She tells him to win._

_And he’s never been able to tell her no._

_~_

_Hello again. No more confessions, sorry._

_But I will tell you the truth._

_It might take a little while._

_So, do you want me to tell you a story?_

_~_

_There’s this emperor, and he asks a shepherd’s boy,_

_How many seconds in eternity?_

_~_

_Bird._

_~_

_“If you think because she’s dead, I am weak, then you understand very little. If you were any part of killing her and are not afraid, you understand nothing at all. So, for you own sake, understand this: I’m the Doctor, I’m coming to find you, and I will never, ever stop.”_

_~_

_Her portrait._

_~_

_Skulls._

_~_

_Room twelve._

_~_

_He mourns._

_~_

_Who’s been playing about with the stars?_

_~_

_How many seconds in eternity?_

_~_

_Bird._

_~_

_Twelve thousand years._

_How many seconds in eternity?_

_The shepherd’s boy—_

_~_

_Bird._

_~_

_The shepherd’s boy says—_

_~_

_Bird._

_~_

_Twelve hundred thousand years._

_~_

_He mourns._

_~_

_Bird._

_~_

_Twenty million years._

_He mourns, because when he finds himself taking refuge once more in his TARDIS, he forgets to trip over her shoes._

_There’s this mountain of pure diamond. It takes an hour to climb it, and an hour to go around it—_

_~_

_Bird._

_~_

_Fifty-two million years._

_He mourns._

_Every hundred years, a little bird comes and sharpens its beak on the diamond mountain._

_~_

_Bird._

_~_

_Nearly a billion years._

_And he mourns her, because he watched her die only yesterday._

_When the entire mountain is chiseled away, the first second of eternity will have passed._

_~_

_Bird._

_~_

_Well over a billion years._

_He mourns for her, because he can still feel her warm little fingers against his lips._

_And sometime after the first billion passes, an idea, a plan begins to form, if he’s right—_

_He can’t stop now. Because if he gets to the other side—_

_~_

_You must think that’s a hell of a long time—_

_~_

_Bird._

_~_

_Two billion years._

_He mourns for her, is almost swallowed by it, because he doesn’t think he’ll ever forget the way her eyes grew so round whenever she looked at him._

_His own hell. Every second designed to torture him till he begs for death._

_But he has a duty of care._

_Personally, I think that’s one hell of a—_

_~_

_Bird._

_~_

_He mourns for her, and every time he sees the wall, understands, remembers—_

_He mourns for her all over again, because it’s been so long. He can feel every year stretching between where he is now, and the last time he saw her face._

_The first face his face ever saw._

_And it dances before his eyes as his shattered fist feels true sunlight for the first time since the first second of eternity began to pass by._

_~_

_Personally, I think that’s one hell of a bird._

_~_

The moment he steps into the hot sun, he knows he was right.

 _Gallifrey._

But he only needs one thing here, and it’s nothing at all to do with the timelords.

_“Go to the city, find somebody important, and tell them I’m back. Tell them I know what they did, and I’m on my way._

_And if they ask you who I am, tell them I came the long way ‘round.”_

He knows what they did.

_~_

_If you think because she’s dead, I am weak, then you understand very little. If you were any part of killing her and are not afraid, you understand nothing at all. So, for you own sake, understand this: I’m the Doctor, I’m coming to find you, and I will never, ever stop._

_XII_

_Hers_

_—_

_“There was a saying, Sir, in the Time War.”_

_“A saying?”_

_“The first thing you notice about the Doctor of War, is he’s unarmed. For many, it’s also the last.”_

~

“Get off my planet.” 

A line in the sand.

A woman, a barn that’s still standing, in spite of all.

And every Gallifreyan he hasn’t seen in well over four and a half billion years.

_Not that he’s had any time for counting._

~

Words are his weapons, and he’s had eternity to sharpen them on a mountain made of diamond.

The matrix.

The _prophecies._

It’s so easy.

_I’ll need help._

_The use of an extraction chamber. To talk to an old friend._

_~_

_He sees her, frozen, and it’s like her portrait—something lost and floating in time._

_A long, long time ago._

_“This way—I can save you!”_

_And she follows._

_~_

She becomes real, flesh and blood, the moment she walks through the door, the tiny slice they’ve cut in time for her.

_And eternity turns on its head, rewritten._

He doesn’t have a moment to think though, a moment to let on, because it’s been eternity for him but only a heartbeat for her, and he’s breathless with it.

 _Clara Oswald._

_Alive—almost._

“I was about to die. I should be _dead.”_

_Everything you’re about to say—I already know._

His hearts are hammering hard enough to make up for hers. 

_Where are we? Is this a TARDIS?_

“Basically, my place.”

 _Gallifrey._

And then—her ears.

 _Not her ears. Her heart._

He doesn’t want to tell her. Can’t think _how_ to tell her, because he knows Clara. She’s all heart; every last bit of her. From her little humans that she wrangles on the daily to the wretched cue cards she’s written up for him.

_They’ll have dissolved by now—lost to time._

Her heart might just be bigger than his two. _And she’s panicking because it’s stopped._

He tries to comfort her; tries to soothe her, to keep her calm. 

_His hands on her arms, his lips near her ear, a soft whisper, ‘It doesn’t matter—’_

“It matters to _me!”_

And she flinches away like he’s struck her.

_Clara._

It doesn’t matter what the General has to say. They’ll have to rid him of every single regeneration in him if they want to put Clara Oswald back in her own timestream.

 _They ended it before she ever should have had to die._

A punch. A jaw.

_A gun._

He hasn’t held a Gallifreyan weapon in— 

_Lifetimes._

But he still remembers how it works.

 _There is no stun setting._

_Clara Oswald by his side. He hasn’t allowed himself to pay any real mind, not yet, when everything is balancing on one precarious point._

_Clara Oswald by his side, alive, and an eternity of mourning her fresh and bleeding in his mind._

Clara Oswald, her fingers in his, soft, _real,_ not just a conjured memory toying with his mind.

“Doctor, _please.”_

 _Clara, afraid._

_If this is the last I ever see of you…_

But he can’t be the Doctor all of the time.

~

 _He swore once that he’d never venture back here._

_Never again._

_The wraiths already know him, no matter which face he wears._

~

The moment they leave the soldiers, the moment they enter the cloisters, is the moment he can’t hide from it any longer. 

He can’t hide himself from _her._

He tries. He’s fast, and he’s smart, and he tells her about the cloisters, the sliders, the matrix like it’s just another planet, though the last time they did this together seems like so, _so_ long ago. 

She listens, and she’s _brilliant._

 _Bloody brilliant Clara._

His hearts are pounding—he swore he’d never come back down here, with the wraiths who know him, no matter his face, but here he is.

_With her._

Her hand in his, running. Her asking questions—she always does that, and all he can think of are long, unending years all alone, passed by explaining in painstaking detail his every moment, hoping that one day she’d answer back.

_Now, he doesn’t know how to explain to her even the first moments that passed after her death._

A death that won’t exist for much longer, if he has anything to say about it.

_And if anyone’s got a problem with that, to hell with them._

Her footsteps alongside his echo strangely in his mind, and when they find the hatch, when he lowers himself to his hands and knees to work and she settles herself beside him to peer at his hands and watch, it’s like something out of a dream he dreamt a very long time ago— _his Clara beside him, watching him, breathing with him._

_So strange now, when it’s the only thing in the world he wants to feel familiar._

_She’s brilliant, and he can hardly look at her because if he does he’ll never be able to focus. He’s already trembling with the overwhelming Clara-ness that he hasn’t felt for eternity, seems like. He doesn’t remember her smelling quite like this, all human sweetness—that shampoo that she always liked—and has her voice always been so soft and catching?_

_If he stops to think on it, he’ll never be able to finish what he knows needs to be done._

_His hands are already trembling with it, though he can’t quite tell if they’re trembling for what he’s about to do, the racing plan that’s streaked itself across his mind, or for Clara, because she’s here with him after all this time._

She laughs at him; at his small madness— _the moon and the president’s wife._

It was the president’s daughter. 

She asks if she was nice.

 _When do I not see you?_

Clara. He—

 _Wants to touch her._ It’s _different._ New, the desire to feel her thoughts brushing against his own, leaping from her mind to his across joined hands or her arms around him.

_He can’t let her hold him. It’s been so long, he feels so old and tired now, he’s certain she’d touch him and he’d break._

There are so many human emotions swirling around inside her, soaked up into him every time her arms wrap themselves around him, _so much bigger on the inside._

He wants them like he wants his next breath. 

But the plan that’s been building inside of him is so big, he knows he would never have the room.

 _Maybe just once, after. At the end, when it’s all be said and done, maybe he’ll hold her hand, and feel her pour into him just one last time. Some sweetness to remember her by—to stave off the aching hunger he’s sure to feel as he watches over her while her decades fly by at a jarring, human speed._

_So fleeting, but every second all her own._

But she asks him to look. Laughs at him, and then _demands_ that he meet her eyes.

He doesn’t have time. 

Plan.

Plan.

_Plan._

Every second has been carefully taken into account in his scheme, because he’s not just racing against his own clock anymore, but against hers. With every passing second, the time continuum remains in limbo, wobbling with the loss of Clara Oswald.

 _She needs to go back, not to Trap Street, never to Trap Street, but back into time as soon as possible. If he manages it quick, maybe the damage won’t be so bad._

He’s got a very narrow shot.

_But he’s never been one to bet against the Doctor before._

He’s got almost no chance.

But it’s better than no chance at all.

_She demands that he look at her. That face, the first one his face ever saw._

_He doesn’t have time._

_But he does it anyway, because she’s Clara, and he’s lived through longer than eternity for her._

_And he’s her friend. It’s his job to comfort her when she’s scared._

A pause. He looks her in the eyes, forces his hands to be still so that he can listen to her.

_“What is it?”_

And there she is, his girl with the huge brown eyes.

_“How long has it been for you?”_

Clara. _Please, just see me._

Now she sees him _too_ well.

But none of it matters. Not one second of it. Because she’s here now, and that’s been the whole point.

_The coat. The velvety one. She liked it. It was very Doctor-y. He hasn’t been Doctor-y in a very long time._

_Not without her._

_“Tell me what happened to the Doctor.”_

_Her friend. His friend. Her huge eyes, he wants to tell her._

_He doesn’t know if he can find the words._

_But she could ask him for anything, the stars, the planets, the universe, and he’d see to it that it was given to her._

_All she’s asking for is a story, told in the dark._

_A story that is longing to be told, but that he can’t trust a single soul with._

_Except, maybe her._

_~_

He can see it all in her eyes.

But just because he can see it, doesn’t mean he knows what it is.

_Clara, with those big, brown things, all inflated and fixed on him._

She’s hanging on his story.

_“Twenty feet of pure diamond—harder than diamond. But you’ll break through anything, given time.”_

_“How much time?”_

He doesn’t even know—not exactly. _Knows only that it was long, and full of pain, and that he has been in mourning for her for longer than he has lived without knowing her._ But he knows it was longer than her human mind will allow her to understand.

 _The first second of eternity will have passed._

The hybrid doesn’t matter.

The hybrid won’t _ever_ matter, just so long as she is safe.

And Clara, with her fierceness, her fighting, her never giving up, she hasn’t lost it in all this time, with her heart sitting useless in her chest.

 _He’s missed her so._

She’s angry; he knows by the look in her eye that he’s made her angry, but he can’t tell how, or why, or what to do about it, and they’re running out of _time._

_Four and a half billion years._

She’s trembling, shaking with it like she didn’t on Trap Street.

_She was so brave, saying goodbye._

But now he sees her, and he’s afraid he’s watching her break. Her eyes, they’re not just huge, but when he sees them, it’s like they hold _everything._ He sees more in those eyes now than he’s seen in whole galaxies spanning centuries, _and he’s afraid._

Clara Oswald, and she can’t break now, because he needs her strong.

_He needs her steady because he’s all out of strength, and is going to need to borrow some from her if he’s going to accomplish what he came for._

She says it— _Clara_ says it, the number. _Four and a half billion years,_ and for the first time he thinks he can feel every second weighing on him, pressing at him until it’s on his every side, because when she says it, it’s _real._

 _Her humanness, her horror, makes it real. This, her beside him, no heartbeat to be had, is so terribly real, and he wants to break something, to hurt someone, because she’s Clara Oswald, and she shouldn’t be like this, all hurt, and scared, and dying._

She’s so _human,_ and all of her hits him just then, in a way it never has before.

_He’s waited four and a half billion years for her, and in that time her entire race rose and fell._

Maybe—maybe _he_ is the mountain, the diamond that is whittled and chipped away at; broken. And it’s always her, with her sharp words and sharper eyes. She’d make a good bird, he thinks, but eternity is a long time, and she was never built for it, lovely, human Clara. 

_She was born a mayfly, and he was born a mountain. Mountains aren’t supposed to need mayflies, to hold them close, because with a breath of smoke they disappear._

_“Why would you do that? I was dead—I was dead and gone! Why—why would you even do that to yourself?”_

Clara, and her tiny hands. They’re pushing at him, clutching, _shaking,_ and he remembers kissing those fingers. Holding them close and imagining he could make a moment stretch out for eternity. 

_He can do anything—there’s nothing he can’t do._

_But he’s not supposed to._

And then those fingers were gone from his own, and she was walking down Trap Street, and he was holding her close again, no heartbeat, carrying his sweet girl close to his chest and out of the night that killed her.

 _Four and a half billion years, and in all that time, through all those deaths, he found a moment to paint a portrait of her. To care for it, to make sure the colors never faded._

_Four and a half billion years, and not a second of it passed without him mourning for her._

Brave girl. 

Because he’s shown her the stars, given her planet after planet, and with every adventure all he could wonder was _what if something happens to her?_

 _“I have a duty of care.”_

And he doesn’t know how to be the Doctor without her. Not anymore. Not after everything she’s seen him through.

_Because some days he doesn’t know his own face, but he can hardly remember a single moment of not knowing hers._

Those brown eyes of hers; he had to fight, had to live, had to _die_ for as long as it took, because he couldn’t live out the rest of his days, all the regenerations she bought for him, without seeing them one more time.

_She’s crying._

He hates it, _hates_ that he’s making her cry, has never been able to watch tears fall down her cheeks without feeling the salt stinging him somewhere between his hearts.

 _He doesn’t want to make her sad. He doesn’t want to make her scared._

_And all he can think is that even her tears are a little bit beautiful, in a burning star kind of way._

He wrenches breath into his chest.

The workshop—he’s nearly there. They’ll have TARDISes there.

_“I have something I need to say.”_

They don’t have time, he can’t run fast enough to keep the whole plan together as it is, they need to—

_But she says her time is up. She said her goodbye to him on Trap Street only a little while ago, less than an hour, and an eternity away._

_Frozen, between one heartbeat and the next._

_Frozen, and it stops the air inside of him, brings him up short, because those eyes, those tears, he knows her, knows her face, knows her voice, knows everything about her. Keeps her tucked away safe inside of him, all of herself that she’s poured into him through time and space._

_He knows those eyes, knows that heart, and he knows Clara—knows that she believes its next beat will be its last._

But he won’t let it be. 

_Not his Clara. His beautiful Clara._

_“People like me and you, we should say things to one another. And I’m going to say them now.”_

And he looks at her, listens. Has no time to give, but gives her all the time he’s got left, because she’s Clara, and he’ll give her whatever she likes.

_Everything you’re about to say—I already know._

_~_

_She speaks very softly, and very slowly._

_She reaches out and holds his hands in hers; his have lines in them and hers are smooth, and she knots their fingers together and pulls them into her lap, and he knows she means to give him all she can in this moment; that the touch is meant to make her his completely, here, in the cloisters, with the timelords at her back._

_She says things._

_Whispers them to him, peers straight into his eyes out of her own, and he spends another eternity there, longer than the last, being lost in her and wondering if she’s lost in him, or if she’s the one guiding him through._

_She’s holding every last bit of him in the palms of her hands, and he knows she knows it. Can feel how careful she is with him, and he wants to wrap her up in his arms and be just as tender with her. This body’s never done it, his mind can hardly remember how, but he’s certain he’d learn to gentle himself._

_For her._

_She says things, and he listens, gives her all of himself, and he’s breathless and shattered by the time she’s done, because everything she’s just said, he’s known it all along, since the first time his face saw hers, but it’s been a secret, kept locked away inside of him, hidden even from himself._

_He hurts, because if he knows and she knows, they could’ve said it all sooner, and then they might not be here, buried so far below any hint of sun._

_He smiles, a frail, trembling thing, while she holds him steady like she always does, his Clara, because she’s worked out what he never could—the words to make every puzzle piece click into its place, and they’re so simple, he wants to laugh at himself._

_She speaks words, promises him things, and her words—they’re so perfectly human, and they’re all so much bigger on the inside. She gives him her human words, emotions, things like love, and trust, and forever, and trusts him to hold them safely even though they’re not of his kind. She fills him up until he thinks he’s going to burst, only to find he’s got room for still more. All her human words—they’re splintering him, breaking him into pieces, but that’s alright. He’ll live his life in pieces if she wants him to._

_He’ll be whatever she likes._

_It’s fine. And he holds her close. His two beating hearts against her human one, gone still._

_But with his hearts thudding against hers, and for a moment, he pretends that he’s human and they’re on her Earth, their pulses pressed together, and that what she’s just told him can be the only thing in the universe that matters for the rest of their lives._

_Four and a half billion years ago, if she had let him, he would’ve told her exactly the same._

~

They run.

_“Don’t worry, Doctor. They’ll all be looking at me.”_

His hands tremble as she loosens the knots their fingers have made while she speaks, and he curls them against his palms, keeping the cooling touch of her close.

_Little pieces of her, seeping into him through his skin against hers._

He promises, swears on everything she’s just said and everything he never has that he’ll come back for her.

She believes him. He can see it in her eyes.

He steals a TARDIS. One with perfect navigation and not a scratch on it.

 _And they run away._

_~_

_“After all this time—after everything I’ve done, don’t you think the universe owes me this?"_

_“All you’re doing is giving her hope.”_

_“Since when is hope a bad thing?”_

_“Hope is a terrible thing on the scaffold.”_

_~_

The moment they break free of Gallifrey’s timezone feels like one of the greatest triumphs of his life.

The moment Clara’s smile falls, is without a doubt his worst defeat.

_Heartbeat. She still doesn’t have one._

_But that’s not right. She should be here, all of her. Everything he knows about time and space tells him that he’s saved her. That she should be_ alive. _That with each bit of distance the gain from Gallifrey, her heartbeat also should be gaining strength._

But she isn’t, and he doesn’t know what else to do. 

_Her eyes—they’re hurting him, flaying him, making him frantic._

It’s so heavy, the thing in his pocket, hot like it’s burning. Insistent.

_A neuroblock. Human compatible._

It will break him. Shatter him to so many pieces, he’ll never recover, even if he lives another twelve lives.

_He doesn’t want to live another twelve lives if she’s not there beside him. Hasn’t he already gone on long enough without her? Four and a half billion years._

_He’s afraid._

She’s so near to him, and it hurts like a thumb pressed too hard against a bruise. _She’s too close._

In a TARDIS, by his side. It’s so much, all at once. So much Clara, so much past.

_He’s been so hungry for it, and now he feels glutted on it, like he’s eaten too much, except he knows he has to run, no matter how sick he feels._

Her heartbeat. Her fragile, human heartbeat. 

And time.

_“It’ll sort itself out—you’ll have a heartbeat. Or don’t you trust me anymore?”_

_“No. Not when you’re shouting.”_

_Her friend, making her afraid._

But she can’t be afraid; not now. _Clara Oswald_ can’t be afraid, because she’s fearless. It’s her bravery that always makes him feel so strong.

_He needs her to not be afraid right now. Needs it more than he can remember needing anything ever before, because he has always been more scared than she can possibly imagine. Always running, from the very first breath, and having the sound of her feet close beside him is what tells him he’s running in the right direction._

But she is afraid. He’s made her afraid.

He has made Clara Oswald afraid of _him._

 _Her Doctor._

Nowhere in space. Forward in time.

_Check your heartbeat again. Pulse, yeah?_

_Let me do it._

_I’m checking it properly!_

_What if one more heartbeat’s all I’ve got?_

One tiny adjustment at the end of everything. _Just this._ That thing in his pocket that feels as heavy as the universe. _Four billion years._

Forgetting is the human superpower

Remembering is his curse, and he thinks— _he knows—_ he’ll keep all of it. All of her. She’s tucked up tight inside of him, filling spaces that are empty if left on their own, and soon all of those gaps will _ache_ with the memory of her and he will _run._

_And she still won’t be there._

But he’s been to hell and back for her—is more the master of it than the devil himself. 

And he’ll damn himself for another billion, billion years before he watches her fall lifeless to the ground again.

_The last ember. As of this moment, he is answerable to no one._

And Clara Oswald fears him. 

She can’t follow him; not here, _now._

He wants her by his side so badly—more than anything, but this, he has to do alone.

_The end of the universe._

_And Me._

_~_

_“I told you once, so long ago, that the universe would become a very small place when I’m angry with you._

_Small enough for you yet?”_

She’s young, and she’s ancient, and _she’s all his fault,_ and she’s been watching the stars die.

_It was beautiful._

_No, it was sad._

_No, it was both. But that’s not something he would understand, is it? He doesn’t like endings._

But she’s wrong—just by a little bit. He _does_ understand beautiful sad. Clara’s human lifetime, so small, so short, all her days stretched out in front of her, ticking away from him too quickly.

_It’s so beautiful, like stars being born and burning out, and it’s the saddest thing he’s ever seen._

And Me is the one who cut it too short. 

_She died, billions of years ago. But right now she’s with him, and he can save her if he can just run fast enough._

Clara Oswald, always saving _him;_ from Daleks, from enemies who would wipe him from time itself. 

_From himself._

But it’s been so long, he’s been too long without her, he thinks he must be beyond saving by now.

_At the very end._

It’s no matter—he doesn’t particularly _want_ to be saved just now. He wants to _win._

_He wants Clara Oswald, safe, alive, and returned to him immediately. Just like she was. Just like he was._

_Now._

But she’s the one thing he knows he can’t have—Clara and her perfect, _human_ words that are still echoing inside of him, healing him and making him bleed. Her tiny hands on him, clutching at him, her eyes, all huge and brown and burning.

_Her single heartbeat. He’ll give that back to her, somehow._

And Me—

She wants to talk about _the hybrid._

She’s a bloody fool if he’s ever seen one. Can’t she see him now? Can’t she see just how _dangerous_ he is in this moment? There’s nothing in the whole universe to hold him back now, and he’s waited an eternity for this war.

_Chaos._

_Broken._

_Heartbeat._

_The two of them, Clara and her Doctor, they’d do anything, turn the universe on its head to save one another. To save his life, to save her soul._

She sends a burning chill through him. A dread. Because he didn’t run away from Gallifrey because he was bored. Never.

_He ran away because he was scared. That’s the only reason anyone ever runs like he has—because they know that if they stop, horrible, terrible things will catch them and never let go._

The hybrid. 

He doesn’t know how to be the Doctor without her. Has never done it a day in his very, very long life.

Passed an eternity without her by his side and knows that one day more will be the end of him.

_As of this moment, he is accountable to no one._

It’s so heavy on him, the thing that he knows is waiting for him in the TARDIS that isn’t his.

_And her._

But it’s been coming to him slowly since the moment he pulled her out of her time stream. Since before then, since coming home, since—since—

_Since the first second of eternity slipped so slowly away._

Her heart isn’t beating, and it’s the universe’s punishment for him, for all the scars he’s left in time to protect her precious human race.

His hell—his atonement—isn’t an inferno, a matrix, a confession dial.

_It’s Clara Oswald, looking into her eyes, those eyes that have learned to see him more clearly than he can see himself, and forcing them to learn to be blind to him instead._

A neuroblock. Human compatible.

And it will break him into so many pieces, he doesn’t think he’ll ever figure out how to put himself back together. Not on his own; not without _her._

_But she’ll be safe. And alive._

_She’ll have a heartbeat, because maybe if they do this, if he steals away from her and never wanders too close again, the universe will finally decide it’s been punishment enough, and her heart will start beating again._

It has to.

So he turns, Me at his side, and they walk back into the TARDIS.

To Clara.

_He doesn’t know how he’s going to find the strength to look her in the eyes._

_One last time._

_~_

And now it’s finally happened—he’s run out of time.

Clara Oswald, and her beautiful, horrible eyes.

They look betrayed. 

They look so frightened.

_Of him._

And he remembers, like only yesterday, the horrible fire of changing, of regeneration, and Clara Oswald looking at him like she was afraid of him—teaching him to fear himself, because the first face his face ever saw, it was like he was feeling her every heartbeat with his own.

 _Please, just see me._

But what is he giving her to see now?

_“I was watching. On the monitor.”_

_And she knows._

Clara Oswald, five foot one, so brave, shaking from head to tiny toes.

_She knows him, and always has._

It won’t hurt, he tells her. Feels his voice cracking in his throat, because he can’t do it like this— _can’t._ Not with her looking at him, knowing him, knowing what he’s got to do.

_He’s so afraid of not being strong enough to follow through. Sometimes, he isn’t as brave as she is._

And his Clara—they’re too alike. _What has he made of her?_

 _“What do you think? I reversed to polarity!”_

_If he pushes the button, it’ll go off right in his own face._

Because Clara Oswald is too brave. 

_“I’m trying to keep you safe!”_

But she’s never asked him for that. 

He can see it all, can imagine every moment of the rest of eternity in his mind’s eye—He’ll watch over her after leaving her on Earth without him, without her memories of him. He’ll guard her human days, invisible.

And when she dies, he’ll mourn for her. He’ll be torn heart from heart, and he’ll remember how fierce she was. He’ll remember her eyes, her never-giving up.

_He’ll remember what she’s made of him, what she’s seen in him. And the pain of it will keeping him running until his own heart beats finally run out._

He can only hope it won’t take too long. He doesn’t like what he knows he’ll become without her. And he can’t bear the thought of the pain.

_The first face his face ever saw. And this one, his Clara, will stay with him, caught inside of him, forever._

But Clara.

_“These have been the best years of my life, and they are mine. Tomorrow’s promised to no one, but I insist upon my past. I am entitled to that. It’s mine.”_

And he can see it in her eyes. Her memories—her memories of _him—_ they are _hers._

_He is hers—her Doctor—for however long she wants him. If she wants to die with him inside of her, just like he’ll die with her inside of him, what right has he to deny her?_

Those things she told him in the Cloisters, those human words, human promises, he hears them inside of him now, nestled safe and warm between his hearts, and she’s given him _so much._ The best years of her life. 

_How can he steal away what little he’s given to her?_

At the end, with her heartbeat stopped, all she asks of him is himself. 

_And it’s all he has left to give her, his precious girl._

His Clara.

 _“Oh, Clara Oswald, what am I doing?”_

He’s driven her to this, to one, final betrayal. And he can’t even find any anger for her, even knowing that she would steal his memories from him in order to keep her own.

_Do you think I care for you so little that betraying me would make a difference?_

Clara Oswald, she’s done it now. The sonic glasses, they can do anything. The button beneath his thumb, it will burn through his mind like a fire, eating away until his last glimpse—and his first—of Clara has gone, burned away like ashes in the wind. 

_And he’s so afraid. More afraid than he’s ever been before, because she’s always been there, since the very first. And he can’t imagine what he’ll be without even the memory of her._

He longs now, for the hurt. For the pain that would be losing her; giving her up. At least the pain would have had a name, a heartbeat. _Clara. Clara. Clara._

But there’s a word. A very, very human word. A word that’s so much bigger on the inside, it’s always stretched so far, it might burst. It word that _aches_ with it, with holding so much. A word that’s not just an emotion, but a promise— _a duty of care—_ and he can’t break it now.

 _There is no Gallifreyan word for her human concept of love. For what she said to him in the Cloisters. For what he tried to say to her four and a half billion years ago._

_It’s something he only learned fully on her Earth._

_Something her echoes taught him to know, and his Clara has taught him to remember._

_It’s not an emotion though. It’s a promise. And in four and a half billion years, he’s broken every vow he’s ever made._

_But he can’t break this one. Not now. Not with Clara Oswald filling him until he’s fit to bursting, all those Clara-shaped holes inside of him running over with her. That’ll all be gone soon, with just a push of a button. He’ll be empty, and he’ll be lost, and he’ll be afraid, and he’ll be alone. He won’t remember her._

_But he will have done it because she’s made him something so close to human. Something that understands a little of her fierce agony of human love._

She’s seen him. Now he breathes deep, his last moments of being allowed to see _her._

_“You’re right. You’re always—always right.”_

He tells her he doesn’t know, tells her it’s a fifty-fifty shot. 

She’ll never push the button if she knows the truth. And she’s got to, because if she doesn’t stop him, he knows nothing ever will.

_You and me, together. Look how far I went for fear of losing you._

_~_

_How about we just don’t?_

_How about we just fly away somewhere?_

_All of time and all of space, in a big, blue box._

_Clara Oswald by his side._

_The best years of their lives._

_But now she’s out of time._

_Now he’s out of chances._

_Between one heartbeat and the last, there’s only one gift he has left to give her. And it’s not showing her how afraid he is of letting her go._

_~_

They push it.

And he can’t tear his eyes away from her.

He has to remember her for as long as he can.

~

_“I don’t think I could ever forget you.”_

Oh, Clara Oswald, she’s so brave, and she thinks she’s going to close her eyes in a moment and fight for her memories of her Doctor.

He can see it in her eyes.

_“Clara, I don’t think you’re ever going to have to.”_

Because he can feel it coming, even now. Like a regeneration so gentle, it could be as quick and as quiet as going to sleep.

_He doesn’t want her to go._

She’s crying. Her eyes, they’ve gone all huge again and wet, the tears splashing out of them and onto her cheeks, and her face is all round with it, trembling. 

_He should be holding her hand. He always does that, when she forgets how to be steady._

But he doesn’t think it would help, because just now he’s shaking worse than she is. 

_And in a few moments, he won’t even remember why._

~

 _Run like hell, because you always need to._

Her hand in his, across all of time and space.

_Laugh at everything, because it’s always funny._

Her smile in her eyes, teaching him how to do the same. A song, a smirk, her arms around him, tugging him close. _He wants to keep that memory so badly._

 _“No, stop it—you’re saying goodbye. Don’t say goodbye!”_

But he’s got to, because he’ll never get the chance to do it again.

_Never be cruel, and never be cowardly. And if you ever are, always make amends._

She’s taught him so well. _Her ridiculous cards._

 _Oh,_ it hurts. He can feel it worming its way through his mind, twisting, ravaging, _stealing._ He’s grappling, fighting, trying to tuck the sweetest, most precious memories away where they won’t be found, but he knows it’s in vain. 

_He can feel himself emptying of her while her tiny hands clutch at his front, her tears falling onto his jacket._

_“It’s okay.”_

He went too far. Became all of his worst nightmares—for her.

_And he would do it again, and again, and again, if it meant just one more adventure with Clara Oswald by his side._

_But he can’t, so it’s time to let her go and not even try._

He’s being torn in two. Losing all of her, every moment of her and all of her echoes all at once, and it _hurts._ It’s terrifying, losing so much of himself, leaving every bit of him that has been wrapped around her for longer than he can remember naked without a hope of ever being covered in her again.

_I accept it._

_I can’t._

Clara.

_Smile for me._

_Go on, Clara Oswald._

_One last time._

A memory he won’t be allowed to keep, but her smiles are so beautiful, it’s like stars are born in them.

And he wants just one more moment of it before he never sees it ever again. 

_How could I smile?_

And love, it’s like a promise, and he _remembers_ what she said in the Cloisters, remembers it for the last time, and it aches. Remembers how she held him, and remembers how he held her on Trap Street because he didn’t want her to feel any more pain.

_It’s okay._

_Don’t you worry._

_I’ll remember it._

And she's beautiful.

And she's sad.

And she’s gone.

~

_With the first breath she takes after the Doctor closes his eyes, Clara Oswald feels her heart begin to beat again, alive and broken. The Doctor was right. He’s always right._

_He just misjudged the time._

_XIII_

_Clara_

_—_

A funny thing, time.

A tiny paradox lives on Trap Street. A glimmer in the air that no one can ever walk through. A moment of time that once happened, and then was unraveled like a ball of yarn. 

_A girl who died, and then didn’t. That glimmer is her first heartbeat. The one that brought life back to her and cut the very smallest of holes in time_

A scar, a little tear in the fabric of the universe. 

The paradox of Trap Street is only so small because it has been broken in two.

The other half of it lives inside a timelord.

_Time travel is damage. A tear in the fabric of reality. And there’s already so much scar tissue in the Doctor; from the Doctor._

A little, tiny paradox, dormant, harmless, resting quietly between his two hearts, makes hardly any difference at all. He can halt it because nothing he’s ever done for the girl called Clara is strong enough to cause so much damage all on its own. No, this damage, all the ripples that have shifted what they shouldn’t, most of them come from Ashildr.

Her death.

_It should’ve happened._

Her life.

 _It’s not all his fault._

And so Ashildr must bear some of the weight too. A headache. A sadness that will follow her around. An extra burden to bear.

A tidalwave that never should’ve been made, though there’s little he can do about it now.

_A funny thing, the universe._

He runs and runs, saves it every day. Some days it’s harder than others.

Some days it requires sacrifice.

_Some days it requires death, and he always tries to make certain it is his own._

And some days, it’s on his side. One day, to be exact.

One day, the universe decides to let his plan work. To contain the paradox, build up enough scar tissue around it to hide it away from the living world, where it can do very little harm.

 _Some days, it allows him to run and run, and never look back._

There’s a little piece of Clara Oswald wrapped up inside the paradox, so tiny, it’s slipped through the neuroblock and lives inside of him indefinitely.

_And he keeps her safe._

She rests between his hearts, and her own heartbeats are tied to his.

It’s a… _romantic_ solution, he supposes once the TARDIS helps him make sense of it, though he can’t think he meant it to be that way.

His heartbeats, and so long as they continue—so long as they hold the paradox—so will hers, he eventually figures out.

_Functionally immortal._

And the moment that they stop, so will hers.

His heartbeats aren’t going to stop for a long, long time.

~

He wakes with a dreadful headache.

His TARDIS greets him, the lights turned low so the glare doesn’t pain him.

And there’s a very, _very_ frightening moment when he can’t think of who he’s supposed to be.

And then. 

_“Doctor?”_

He’s slow. He feels old. And there’s a girl perched on a chair on the other side of the console, her knees tucked under her chin like a little, tiny child, and she’s got enormous eyes.

_He needs a minute. A storeroom inside his mind. Except—well, he’s quite forgotten what’s supposed to be in there. He thinks—he thinks it was the TARDIS. But maybe something else? He tries the TARDIS, but it’s empty and it doesn’t feel quite right._

Mulls things over desperately, because he’s feeling as wobbly as a newborn fawn and there’s a girl he doesn’t remember in his TARDIS with eyes the size of the moon.

He finds—

_Holes._

_Lots and lots of holes._ But there are some memories too. He has to work for them.

_A regeneration. London. Vastra. Who frowned me this face?_

And he has a sudden urge to look in a mirror, because he can’t remember exactly what he looks like.

A—a mummy? On the Orient Express? 

Something awful in St. Paul’s.

_And quite a lot of Daleks._

There are more, but dredging each one up is like trying to lift a TARDIS at actual weight with his own strength, and he’s getting tired.

_None of it explains the girl though._

_Except the holes._ He can remember entire conversations he’s had, every word he said, but he’s got no record of the other half. Remembers something terrible on the moon, remembers going a long way away in his lonely TARDIS, but doesn’t remember why he did it in the first place.

Remembers a planet after the mummy, an explanation, _would you like to think that about me? Would that make it easier?_ But the audience is a mystery.

_“Hel-lo?”_

He tries it out carefully as he drops back into the present world, the girl still in her chair, her eyes still larger than any human’s should reasonably be able to stretch.

 _It’s like they’ve inflated._

_“It’s back.”,_ she tells him dully, and he hasn’t got even a hope of reading her tone. _“My pulse is back. And the tattoo’s gone. I checked in the mirror.”_

Her pulse? Was it gone? _Where did it go?_ Has he brought it back for her? _A tattoo?_

 _“Alright.”,_ he tells her tentatively, feeling in a daze. Her pulse. She’s human—he thinks. So a pulse must be good then.

He can’t tell exactly where they are. The TARDIS isn’t showing it, and the dials are no help because it’s the telepathic circuits that have been used.

He flips switches because he hasn’t got anything better to do. Picks coordinates. Flies them away somewhere— _anywhere._

It’s an entire week before he thinks to ask her name.

~

He spends a lot of time meditating in the weeks that follow her answer. 

_Clara._

And then he asks again, and she answers again. Because he keeps forgetting.

The first time he looks away from her, he thinks he’s died.

He turns back around, and there’s a strange girl sitting in his TARDIS. He’s never seen her before. 

But he has new memories—recent ones. Memories of waking up confused, of being afraid, of _searching._ And there’s a big, aching hole.

_She fits it._

He tries it again then, deliberately. Looks away. Turns around. A strange girl. He’s never seen her before. But this time it’s easier. He looks for her in his memories exactly where he knows she isn’t, and yes, _there she is._ Invisible. He can’t remember a single thing about her. 

_But she was there, because once again, she’s the only thing that fits._

So he does a lot of meditating, eyes wide open, staring at her. Dredges up more memories.

Talks to her. 

She doesn’t tell him much.

And she’s very, very sad.

He doesn’t like that bit, doesn’t like that her eyes have gone all dull and that she curls up into a tiny ball so that nothing else can hurt her.

So he tries harder. 

_But it takes time._

_~_

He’s known horrible things, seen things that no one else should ever have to, but he never imagined the universe would be cruel enough to keep him in love with her, even after he’s forgotten.

But the gaps she leaves…Clara is wrapped up in his _everything._ In every bit of him, there she is, wound up tight in every adventure, every rescue, every hope and despair, and while he can’t remember changing, can’t remember his first breath in this face because presumably _she was there,_ he does remember what it felt like to wake up alone; what it felt like to wake up strange, and laid starkly, painfully bare. 

And he knows that left on his own, there could have been no possible way to get from there to here. 

It can only have been her.

He gets better at it—at remembering. As their first month of running passes by, he learns to turn his back on her, and remember when she comes back into his line of sight.

 _A neuroblock. Human compatible._ The TARDIS helps him find it, identify it, and it makes him breathless because the technology’s Gallifreyan.

He still can’t leave the room without her and remember her when he gets back. He doesn’t care to leave the room without her at _all,_ because losing even his current, feeble memories of her is enough to make him panic, running back to her, _what’s your name?_

She turns, sees him, smiles at him a little sadly. _Clara, Doctor. It’s Clara._

Once, he almost calls her Oswin, though he has no idea where that came from. 

_Human compatible, but human is just what he’s not. So the coverage is a little spotty, and the result is more than a little uncomfortable. But it’s fine. He’ll learn._

And memories. Little ones.

He asks her questions. 

_Weren’t they in a submarine once?_

_Why were they on the Orient Express?_

_What’s a snog box?_

_And why does he want to know?_

She wipes at her eyes when he asks her that one, and he almost takes it back. But then she smiles and tells him, and it’s so charmingly human, he smiles too.

_And then loves her all over again, because smiling feels so good with her, he never wants to do anything else._

Once, he asks her what happened on the moon.

She tells him they’ll talk about it later, when he’s better.

He tells her he doesn’t think he’s getting better. Not like that.

She shakes her head. They’ll talk about it later.

~

They have adventures, and the trust she places in him is terrifying.

_Be a Doctor._

Neither of them say what she really means.

_Be her Doctor._

Because how can he, when he doesn’t remember how?

But he tries to be, and he thinks that’s probably the point. 

~

The first time he joins them psychically, it happens entirely by accident. 

He loses her on a planet; takes his eyes off her for just a second and misplaces her, and the panic takes hold of him the moment she leaves his gaze, except they’re not within the safety of the TARDIS just now, and he hasn’t got time to go looking for her.

_And how would he even look, when he can’t remember a damned thing about her?_

_Just that there are holes in him, and that they hurt, they’re bleeding from being left too suddenly empty, and that there’s a girl out there—she’s called Clara, he knows, because he’s written it on his wrist just in case—who can fill them. Clara-shaped holes, and he can only hope he’ll be able to recognize her by the way she fills him if he can ever find her._

In the end, he doesn’t have to. He walks into his TARDIS to find something, anything, maybe he’s got a picture of her tucked away, and there she is.

_It can only be her, though he’s never seen her before in his life._

And he falls forward into her, her arms around him, his arms dragging her close to ease his own panic. _He never thought he’d find her again._

Clara.

His temple is resting against hers before he realizes what he’s doing. He just wants her closer, wants to know her, to remember her, and he’s slipped inside before he knows it. 

And it’s _wonderful._

The bliss is greater than anything he’s felt in over two thousand years, maybe even longer. She’s warm and she’s welcoming, and there are so many memories. _They all feel like his. It’s like touching her from the inside out and finding himself inside of her._

He’s floating in her, dying in her, _wants_ to die in her, and he--

Drops a piano on her.

~

He sits beside her while she sleeps, fetches cool cloths for her. Relearns her face a dozen times during the night when he’s forced to leave her in search of painkillers that won’t kill a human.

He feels guilt. What was he thinking, dropping a timelord’s mind into her little human one?

 _It just felt so good._ Like coming home after a billion, billion years away. 

So he watches her sleep, and he doesn’t get bored even once in the long night. 

_She’s Clara. She’s the answer to every question he’s got, and that face, the pull, the fascination he holds for it, it can only be the first face his face ever saw._

_And whether the universe thinks it’s being cruel or kind, it’s stolen every memory he’s ever had of her, has left him with nothing._

_But it’s let him remember that he’s in love with her—when did he become so human?—and he supposes that will have to be enough._

_~  
_

When she wakes up, he has a dozen new memories, all of them starring her. 

But they’re already fading away.

The psychic link, it allows him to remember, if only for a little while, because the neuroblock can’t keep out what’s already inside. It’s human compatible, which means it wasn’t built to withstand a timelord’s telepathy.

She has a headache.

He gives her painkillers and apologizes profusely.

But when he calls her Clara this time, it doesn’t just sound right.

It _feels_ right. 

And from then on, whenever they get lost, or he leaves her, he doesn’t need the letters of her name scrawled on his wrist to help him remember.

 _He’s the Doctor, he’s over two thousand years old, and her name is Clara._

_Sometimes it’s all he knows._

_But he knows it, and he isn’t about to forget._

_~_

He practices.

She is patient.

He never was one for telepathy, but he can bear a lifetime of being blind; of being led, of being led along memories that he can’t quite reach on his own. He can bear a long, unending lifetime of trusting every bit of himself to a girl he can’t remember—a girl he will always forget.

But if there’s just the smallest chance that for single, isolated moments, just long enough to slip his mind into hers and back out again, he could remember, he doesn’t think any force in the universe can stop him from making it happen.

Because he doesn’t remember exactly what he saw in Clara’s mind, has already forgotten what he felt, but he knows one thing.

_It felt like home._

_~_

She knows how to fly the TARDIS.

He watches her at it, watches how careful she is. How she copies his steps to the letter, even the unnecessary ones.

She looks good doing it—like she belongs.

He doesn’t know how much time has passed since he woke up half blind and mostly lame, all his memories gone to hell, but he’s been waiting.

_Practicing._

She lands them, floating out somewhere in space, and he’s behind her when she does, his fingers so close, he can almost feel her hair brushing the pads of them.

_Clara._

_Please. Let me. I need it. I’m dying for it. Please, Clara._

And, _I’m sorry._

He is. He’s so sorry he doesn’t remember. So sorry that sometimes he doesn’t know her eyes, or her laugh, or her smile. Only her name.

_Please, Clara._

And she says yes. She always does.

_And he sinks into her._

_She washes over him, warm and soothing, seeps into him while he seeps into her, until they’re just one being, floating somewhere in the universe._

_And there they are._

_Because when he’s inside of her this way, when she wraps him up warm and tight in her memories—he’s put so much practice into being gentle—there are tiny, precious, painful moments when he can remember. He can remember everything._

_It’s something different each time._

_Perfect. Incandescent. Wounding. Every bit of Clara Oswald filling him up, and he knows her._

_It’s okay. Don’t you worry. I’ll remember it._

_It stings him so suddenly, pierces him, and he sees her tears like they’re in front of him now. He holds her close that time, crushes her a little too hard against his chest but can’t let go, because he remembers the sweet, sweet sadness and despair. Remembers loving her so perfectly in his final seconds of truly being with her._

_She’d cried tears onto him, and one had landed on his hand, and he can still feel it there when she lets him inside of her like this._

He can’t stay inside of her mind forever.

He’s a timelord. His mind in hers is like dropping a piano on her, and even he can be gentle for only so long.

When he pulls himself so slowly, so carefully out of her, sees her eyes on his in the present, real and perfect in front of him, she’s doing that thing again, making her sad smile, and he almost cries strange tears of his own, he’s missed knowing that smile so much.

_Clara._

And he rests his brow against hers, and tries to hold onto the brief minutes of remembering left to him before the neuroblock steals them from him and leaves him blank again, her blind Doctor.

 _If he could, he would stretch them into an eternity._

_But he can’t, so he winds his fingers around her neck._

_Sometimes he feels like he’s going to die if he can’t feel her pulse._

_Before he lets go, he won’t remember why he cherished it so much in the first place, except that she’s Clara, and he doesn’t always remember why he loves her, but always that he does._

_~  
_

They keep running, just like they always have, and they stop at cafes for coffee between adventures. 

Once, he aims for London and gets Glasgow instead, and she laughs and laughs like it’s funnier than it really is.

It’s alright though. He quite likes her laugh.

Once, he does it on purpose just to see her smile.

And then they get separated again, and he forgets it ever happened, but sees Glasgow on the map and thinks that Clara would probably like it there, though he has no idea why.

A month on from the last time, he’s shot through with the longing again, begging her _please, please._

_Needing_ her.

And she lets him in.

_Don’t run. Stay with me._

_Oh God. He presses closer even though he wants nothing more than to pull away. Clara Oswald he_ knows _her. Remembers everything about her. Remembers everything about this moment, and he never wanted to live it again._

_Technically shouldn’t be able to live it, because her heart is beating all on its own, so really, this never happened._

_Except they both know that it did._

_Because he can feel it now, all the words, the human words he doesn’t know how to speak because timelords don’t properly know how to feel them, and she’s whispering comfort to him like he’s the one about to die._

_Everything you’re about to say, I already know._

_And it strikes him that he hasn’t said it yet. In…how long? He doesn’t know. Time escapes him now like it never has before. And he doesn’t care to chase after it, because what he needs more than anything is Clara Oswald close by his side._

_He should say it; should tell her, even though she already knows._

_She told him._

_He savors every last moment of agony, and yes, yes. Clara Oswald was beautiful as she died._

He holds it as close as he can when it’s over, when it’s just his cheek against hers in the TARDIS, her arms around him tight because he’s trembling.

Makes his knuckles white trying to keep it, because that memory is _his._

Until it isn’t.

He stops shaking then, holds her close because she’s Clara and he loves her, though he doesn’t really remember why, and his hand comes up to stroke her hair.

_He loves her, though he doesn’t really remember why._

Maybe he should ask her? Maybe she could tell him? 

_But then he’d have to tell her._

He keeps silent. Afraid.

 _He loves her, though he doesn’t really remember why._

_~_

He makes a mistake.

And it almost costs him his Clara.

He loses her again, only this time it’s life or death, and he hasn’t the slightest idea of where to find her again.

There—there are people. 

There are Daleks.

And he’s so _afraid_ for her.

It takes him a whole week, floating in his TARDIS and nearly killing himself to find her again. 

_He’s nearly driven mad in that week, remembering a girl he can’t remember. He learns the art of it though. Learns to remember her by the spaces she leaves. He remembers a village of Vikings. Remembers deciding to leave, then to stay._

_He doesn’t remember changing his mind._

_And there she is. That’s his Clara. And he has a thousand more memories like it. Remembers being in a base at the bottom of a deep, deep lake, and knowing with utter certainty that he was going to die._

_And then deciding not to._

_There she is, his Clara._

When he finally finds her, a girl he’s _never seen before in his life,_ his hands shake so much when they cup her cheeks, she brings her own up to his to him them steady.

He hauls her inside the TARDIS, close to him, _so close._

Kisses her hair and finds that it’s very, very soft. 

Says nothing but _Clara, Clara, Clara,_ all over again, for what he thinks could be hours.

He isn’t sure.

And she lets him. She wraps her arms around his shoulders, presses herself as close as she can be. Whispers things like _Shh, Doctor, I’m here. It’s me. It’s Clara. I’m here._

And he lets her comfort him, because he’s been so alone without her. He’s got a time machine—it’s only been a day for her, but a whole week for him, and he never wants to lose her again. 

He sinks into her, _knows her,_ and it’s effortless. Lives inside her mind and pulls her further into the TARDIS all at the same time. Doesn’t let go of her, will _never_ let go of her, and wants her closer against him still.

_He wants her to be inside of him._

Telepathy, linking their minds, has always been difficult.

At least, the way they do it. For the link to do him any good, he has to open all of their doors, each and every one.

Like he hasn’t done since the last time he laid with a timelord—his wife.

_A girl who looked very suspiciously like a Clara from deep in his past. He wonders just how far back her echoes go._

It’s intimate and so warm. Everything good and wonderful and _Clara,_ and he always has to try so hard not to just pour all of himself into her.

 _He wants to._

Now, it seems, he has no hope of holding back.

This time he fights the current of memories, sorts through them, because he only wants one.

_People like us should say things to each other. And I’m going to say them now._

_“Clara.”_

And she knows. He knows she knows. Knows she knows that he’s her Doctor now. _Her Doctor._

He knows her.

She holds him closer, and her human words turn into human actions. Human hands on a chest with two hearts, their beats tumbling one over the other.

Her mind inside of his inside of hers. Her skin on his, his skin crawling beneath hers.

_He just wants her close. Safe. His. He’s always been hers._

_It’s beautiful. It’s everything. It’s every word he’s never said, though he whispers it into her mind at the very end, when she’s all sweaty and huffing beneath him. Human._

_She whispers it back into his ear._

_He curls himself around her. Drapes his arms around her shoulders, buries his head against her breasts_

He falls into an utterly human sleep to her beating heart, and he dreams of remembering her, until he doesn’t remember what he was dreaming about.

~

He wakes up nestled into a pile of blankets with a naked girl he’s never seen before in his life. 

But he knows her name is Clara.

And he knows that he loves her, though he can’t quite remember why.

She smiles at him when she wakes up, and it’s an odd sort of smile, a little bit happy and a little bit sad at the same time, and he feels like he could live inside of that smile if she’d let him. Like he could curl up there and be nothing at all but hers forever and ever. He’s got a time machine. They can be together for every second of eternity if she’s of a mind to.

 _“Doctor."_

_“Clara.”_

_“Are you alright?”_

_“Hmm.”_

And he says things to her. Because people like them—people so adrift in the world that they’re only at home when they’re with each other, people who know the rhythm of one another’s heartbeats, whose trust in each other is worth more than their lives—they _should_ say things to each other.

So he says them now.

He doesn’t remember everything about him and her, but he manages well enough.

~

One day they’ll stumble across a ship filled with walls and walls of glass.

 _Memories._ Of people who’ve died.

But also of people who’ve lived. Not truly, but they know enough about memories to help a timelord who’s lost every one that ever mattered.

And with a touch to his temple, his eyes will be opened, and he’ll weep.

Clara has never seen him cry before. _Only the once, when she’s certain he was weeping without hears. She can still feel his lips on the back of her hand, so gentle. Don’t run. Stay with me._

That night, when she makes him coco like she hasn’t in _so long,_ he’ll hold her very close to his side, and he won’t even realize it when he burrows himself deep into her mind, nestled tight inside of his Clara.

He’ll hold her heartbeat very close to his chest.

_Clara Oswald._

Heart beating. _Pulse. Pulse. Pulse._

No tattoo on the back of her neck. 

A tiny little paradox, locked safely away, dormant. Made harmless by all the scar-tissue he’s caused, resting between his two hearts. Linking them for as long as their pulses beat.

He’s so tired of losing, but he’ll lose all the universe likes if it’ll just allow him to keep this win.

_He’ll never let her go._

They’ll cling to each other, and he’ll whisper entire universes into her ear, and she’ll smile at him and give him all the human promises she owns.

One day.

They’ll get there eventually, the long way ‘round.

But for now, there’s world enough.

_And time._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for taking this trip with me you guys, and I hope you liked it. Any and all plot holes in this chapter are all mine...and yeah, I think that's it.
> 
> Roe

**Author's Note:**

> Leave a comment--I love feedback!


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